Dictionary:

Scotland

  (skŏt'lənd)

A constituent country of the United Kingdom comprising the northern part of the island of Great Britain as well as the Hebrides, Shetland Islands, and Orkney Islands. Inhabited by Picts in prehistoric times, the region was invaded but never conquered by the Romans and split into a variety of small kingdoms after the fifth century A.D. In the ninth century most of Scotland was unified into one kingdom, but conflicts with the English to the south soon erupted, leading to a series of bloody wars. When Mary Queen of Scots's son James VI succeeded to the English throne in 1603, the two kingdoms were united. Scotland became a part of the kingdom of Great Britain by a parliamentary act of 1707. Edinburgh is the capital and Glasgow the largest city. Population: 5,120,000.

For more information on Scotland, visit Britannica.com.

For a small nation, Scotland has made a quite disproportionate contribution to the art of photography. Even before David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson began their groundbreaking work in Edinburgh in the summer of 1843, Scotland had a significant role in the development of the medium. In the 18th century, Scotland was a European leader in the study of science, medicine, and philosophy. The Scottish Enlightenment had produced such significant figures as David Hume, Adam Smith, Robert Adam, James Hutton, Raeburn, and Burns, and an English visitor reported of Edinburgh's High Street that he could, ‘in a few minutes, take 50 men of genius and learning by the hand’. One such was the great chemist Joseph Black FRS; and among those who came from all over Europe to study at Edinburgh University with him was Thomas Wedgwood, who was there from 1786 to 1788, and who subsequently worked with Humphrey Davy on an idea of photography. The physicist David Brewster, an expert in light and optics, reported their experiments in the Edinburgh Magazine of December 1802 and subsequently became a close friend of Henry Talbot. By 1839, when Talbot announced his photogenic drawing process, Brewster was principal of the United Colleges of St Leonard and St Salvator at St Andrews University, and it was through his agency that the calotype came to Scotland.

Brewster's circle included Sir Hugh Lyon Playfair and Dr John Adamson. With the assistance of the optical instrument maker Thomas Davidson, both daguerreotypes and calotypes were made and Adamson's younger brother Robert was prompted into his remarkable but brief career. Robert Adamson set up his studio at Rock House on the Calton Hill in Edinburgh in May 1843, the mouth which saw the Disruption of the Church of Scotland, arguably the most significant event in Scotland in the 19th century, and it was this momentous occasion that prompted the Hill—Adamson partnership.

Photography had already taken Edinburgh, a city of numerous learned societies, by storm. James Bryson claimed to have taken a portrait daguerreotype in 1839 and Thomas Davidson was making daguerreotypes and improving cameras. As early as 17 Apri 1839, Dr Andrew Fyfe (1792-1861) delivered a lecture on ‘The New Art’ to the Society of Arts. In May, Mungo Ponton communicated his discovery of a system of photography using bichromate of potash rather than silver. By October, James Howie, ‘Artist’ at 64 Princes Street, was showing daguerreotypes he had made, and an exhibition in December included examples by Daguerre himself. In the west of Scotland, Revd Dr John Smith Memes (1794-1858) made the first English translation of Daguerre's manual and in Glasgow in 1841 Robert Hunt published his ‘Popular Treatise’ Art of Photography, the first comprehensive account of the medium. In 1843, the Edinburgh Calotype Club became probably the world's first photographic society.

The achievement of Hill and Adamson is so dominant that it is easy to overlook the fact that they were surrounded by many other fine contemporary exponents. In 1844, George Skene Keith made daguerreotypes of Palestine; George Smith Cundell (1798-1882) published his own account of the calotype process. James Ross (d. 1878) and John Thomson (d. 1881) set up their own studio on the Calton Hill about 1846 and were among the first to use the albumen process, winning a medal at the Great Exhibition in 1851. John Muir Wood, a musician and publisher, explored metals in photographic printing.

After Robert Adamson's death, his brother John encouraged Thomas Rodger to set up in business in St Andrews and he himself became an important portrait photographer. Jemima (Wedderburn) Blackburn (1823-1909) was one of the first to employ photography to reproduce her own drawings for publication; Charles Piazzi Smyth, the Astronomer Royal in Scotland, used a stereoscopic camera to take photographs at 2, 730 m (9, 000 ft) in Tenerife in 1856, and in 1865 inside the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Distinguished amateur photographers of the time included the physician Dr Thomas Keith and his brother-in-law John Forbes White (1831-1904). Among the professionals were Thomas Annan and others such as Archibald Burns (d. 1880), James Good Tunny (d. 1887), John Kibble (1815-94), Revd Dr Thomas Kerr Drummond (1799-1888), William Donaldson Clark (1816-73), John Moffat (1819-94), James Cox (1849-1901), Ronald Leslie Melville (1835-1906), and Horatio Ross (1801-86). In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell was the first to experiment with colour photography.

Scotland as a land of romance was largely the invention of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). His writings, the coming of the railways and tourism, and Queen Victoria's love affair with the Scottish Highlands helped raise landscape photography to an industry through George Washington Wilson and James Valentine.

From the beginning, Scots photographers were to be found all over the world. Nearest to home, Lady Clementina Hawarden, originally from Cumbernauld, produced her extraordinary evocative images in London and Ireland. John Thomson travelled in Asia and also produced his Street Life of London. Among the many working in foreign fields, frequently the earliest and most successful photographers in their new countries, were William Carrick in Russia, Alexander Gardner in America, Alexander Henderson and William Notman in Canada, Sergeant James McDonald (1822-85) in the Holy Land, Robert Macpherson in Rome, Dr John Murray in India, James Robertson in Turkey, and George Valentine (1852-90) in New Zealand.

George Valentine, the son of James, indicates the professional and aesthetic continuity in the story. The Annan firm, established in 1855, has a special distinction. Thomas Annan's admiration for D. O. Hill, and his son James Craig Annan's enthusiasm for the calotypes, which he introduced to the New York Photo-Secession, ensured the impact of the Scottish tradition in America. It was this influence which brought Alvin Langdon Coburn to Edinburgh at the beginning of the 20th century to illustrate Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes and helped persuade Paul Strand to work in the Hebrides in 1954. Among others making important documentary photographs, often from an ‘outsider’ perspective, were Werner Kissling (1895-1988) on the island of Eriskay; Humphrey Spender, Bert Hardy, Bill Brandt, and Oscar Marzaroli (1933-88) in Glasgow; Joseph McKenzie (b. 1929) and Wolfgang Suschitzky (b. 1912) in Dundee; Roger Mayne in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The tradition has continued in the work of, for example, John Charity (b. 1946) and Chick Chalmers (1948-98).

Documentary photographers working outside Scotland include Leslie Hamilton Wilson (1883-1968) in India, George Rodger, particularly in Africa, and Grace Robertson (born of Scots parents in Manchester). Influential landscape photographers include Raymond Moore, Fay Godwin, and Murray Johnston (1949-90).

Scottish photography in the late 20th century was encouraged by exhibition and education. In 1977 Richard Hough (1945-85) established Stills Gallery in Edinburgh where he was succeeded by Murray Johnston, who became the first head of photography at the Edinburgh College of Art. The appointment of Thomas Joshua Cooper at Glasgow School of Art was also crucial. Simultaneously, there was a growing awareness of the significance of the Scottish heritage in photography, manifested in 1983 by the founding of the Scottish Society for the History of Photography. In 1984 the National Galleries of Scotland set up the Scottish National Photography Collection, starting with the immensely important holdings of Hill-Adamson calotypes. In 1995, the National Galleries' crucial exhibition, Light from the Dark Room, publicly demonstrated Scotland's historical and contemporary wealth in photography. In 2001, the first moves were made to create a Scottish National Photography Centre in Edinburgh, and funding was obtained in 2004.

The key to progress is the current generation of photographers, many of whom work at international levels of excellence. Gunnie Moberg (b. 1941), Stephen Lawson (b. 1942), Patricia Macdonald (See aerial photography (feature)), John Charity (b. 1946), Ron O'Donnell, Robin Gillanders, David Williams (all b. 1952), Pradip Malde, Ruth Stirling (both b. 1957), Andy Wiener (b. 1959), Maud Sulter, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert (both b. 1960), Calum Colvin (b. 1961), Wendy McMurdo (b. 1962), Owen Logan, Mark Johnston (both b. 1963), Catriona Grant (b. 1964), Iain Stewart (b. 1967), and Jane Brettle (b. 1943) are only some of the significant names that future historians will need to take into account in surveying Scottish photography.

Anon. Forth railway bridge under construction, late 1880s. Albumen print

— David Bruce

Bibliography

• Brittain, D., and Stevenson, S., New Scottish Photography (1990).
• Stevenson, S., (ed.) Light from the Dark Room: A Celebration of Scottish Photography (1995)

Constituent country of the United Kingdom, occupying 30,405 square miles in northern Great Britain. Slightly smaller than Ireland, it has the largest population of all Celtic lands, more than 5,200,000; yet not all Scottish persons are of Celtic heritage. Known as Alba in ancient times, still its name in Scottish Gaelic, Scotland was not always distinguished from the rest of Britain until the Romans failed to conquer it and tried to close it off with walls, Hadrian's in AD 122 and the Antonine Wall further north in AD 138. The native populations of what was then Alba/Scotland, the Caledonii or the Picts, spoke P-Celtic languages related to what was to become Welsh. One of the greatest poems from early Welsh tradition, Y Gododdin, is represented as taking place partially in what is now Scotland; Kenneth Jackson (1969), perhaps mischievously, called it ‘the oldest Scottish poem’.

Scotland takes its name from Irish [Latin Scotti] invaders who migrated in large numbers to Argyll [Scottish Gaelic Oirer Ghaidheal, coast of the Gael], establishing the small kingdom of Dál Riada. After many a century of armed struggle with the Picts and the Brythonic kingdom of Strathclyde, the leader of the Q-Celtic, Goidelic Scotti, Cináed mac Ailpín [Kenneth MacAlpin] (d. 858), merged the three forces into one nation, called Scotland after its most powerful component. In the following centuries the Gaelic language [Scottish Gaelic Gaidhlig] spread across much of Scotland, except for parts of Norse-dominated Caithness and the islands of Orkney and Shetland to the north and the English-dominated regions like Roxburgh and Berwick to the south-east. But pressure against Gaelic began at the top of the power pyramid, as English became the language at court during the reign of Malcolm III, 1058–93, under the influence of his Wessex-born wife, (St) Margaret. Over the next nine centuries English and the English-related Scots dialect (the language of Robert Burns) superseded Gaelic gradually in all but the Hebrides and those parts of the Highlands beyond the Grampian mountains, i.e. the former counties (until 1974) of Argyll, Inverness, Ross and Cromarty, Sutherland, and portions of Perthshire. Called the Gaidhealtachd [Gaelic-speaking area], this region occupies portions of the post-1974 counties of Strathclyde and Highland. The Act of Union (1707) with England somewhat diminished the Scottish sense of nationhood. Far more damaging to Highland culture was the failure of the Jacobite Rebellion (1745–6) and the subsequent suppression of the Gaelic language and culture of those who had supported it. Much of the 19th century saw mass migration from the Gaelic Highlands, some of it forced through clearances, in which crofters (tenant farmers) were driven from small farms to be replaced by herds of sheep. At the end of the twentieth century, Scottish Gaelic is spoken by about 65,000 people in Scotland and fewer than 5,000 in Nova Scotia.

Although Scottish Gaelic passages, linguistically distinguishable from their Old Irish parent, appear in the 12th-century Gaelic notes to the 9th-century Book of Deer, the first extensive record of Scottish Gaelic tradition is found in the Book of the Dean of Lismore (1512–26), in which the spellings are rendered as they would sound phonetically in English, much as Manx is. The Scottish Gaelic bardic tradition continued into the 19th century under clan patronage, producing such distinguished poets as Iain Lóm (c.1625–c.1710), Alastair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (c.1695–c.1770), Rob Donn (1714–78), and Donnachadh Bàn Mac-an-t-Saoir [Duncan Bàn Macintyre] (1724–1812). Despite the differences in geography and political history, not to mention the Norse invasions and the Reformation, much of Scottish Gaelic tradition remained linked to Ireland. Many Scottish Gaelic stories are parallels of Irish stories and have Irish settings. Characters in Irish stories, such as Deirdre or Cúchulainn, travel to Scotland and appear familiar with its geography, although often Scotland is seen as a place of magic and adventure, like other foreign countries. From medieval through to early modern times, commerce and social intercourse continued between Gaelic Scotland and Ireland: large numbers of Highland mercenaries, the galloglasses [Irish gall, stranger; óglach, soldier] migrated to Ireland, and Irish Franciscan missionaries resisted the tide of Calvinism in the Highlands. The now archaic English word for Scottish Gaelic, Erse [Irish], signals a historical perception of this unity. But in the mid-18th century the enormously popular ‘translator’ James Macpherson (1736–96) promoted the still-persistent canard that Scottish Gaelic tradition was separate from and older than its Irish roots. Macpherson's Poems of Ossian (1760–3), drawing on unacknowledged Scottish Gaelic ballads, purported to be a lost epic, contemporary with the ancient classics. The widespread acceptance of this imposture promoted an international interest in Irish and other Celtic traditions. By the mid to late 19th century, informed collectors had assembled large collections of Scottish Gaelic tradition: John Francis Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands (4 vols., Paisley, 1861); Archibald Campbell, Waifs and Strays in Celtic Tradition (4 vols., London, 1889–91); Alexander Cameron, Reliquiae Celticae (2 vols., Inverness, 1894). Old Irish Albu, Alba; Modern Irish Alba(in); Manx Nalbin; Welsh Alban; Cornish Alban; Breton Bro-Skos.

Bibliography

• also Charles W. J. Withers, Gaelic in Scotland, 1698–1981: A Geographical History of a Language (Edinburgh, 1984)
• Derick S. Thomson (ed.), The Companion to Gaelic Scotland (Oxford, 1983; Glasgow, 1994).
• Bibliography under ‘Scottish Gaelic’ for collections of Scottish Gaelic traditions

In 1500 Scotland was a small, poor, and peripheral country on the northern fringe of Europe. Its economy was largely agricultural, its religion unremarkably Catholic, its political leanings toward France, its military and commercial significance minor, its people largely illiterate. By 1800 Scotland was a European leader in the fields of agriculture and commerce; it had long been self-consciously, perhaps aggressively, Protestant; its philosophers had changed the face of European thought; its inhabitants, by now among the best educated in Europe, saw themselves as Scots, but also as Britons; its people, practices, and ideas had left a stamp on the whole British, European, and Atlantic world.

Religion and Politics

The first step in this progression was the Reformation. Politically it was made by Scotland's separate Parliament, at grass roots principally by urban middle classes, and in popular memory by John Knox (1513–1572). Where the Scandinavian and German lands espoused the Word according to Martin Luther, Scotland followed the Swiss model of John Calvin, which also appealed to the northern Netherlands and certain parts of what is now France. To make a political statement against Mary Queen of Scots (1542–1587) and her French connections, Scotland's Parliament introduced in 1560 an assertive Calvinist Confession of Faith. Within a generation or two, Protestantism's institutions were firmly established in the Lowlands, and within three or four generations it had become the faith of most of the country.

Pockets of Catholicism survived into the eighteenth century, but the principal religious battles in the generations after the Reformation were fought over church organization: should it be presbyterian or episcopalian? Bishops and presbyteries coexisted unhappily from 1560 until 1689. The Scottish Revolution of 1638, which eventually led to an invasion of England and the overthrow of Charles I, and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688–1689 were sparked by Presbyterians; powerful ties existed between Scottish Presbyterians and radical English Puritans in the period up to 1646. Late-sixteenthand early-seventeenth-century Scotland was a hotbed of revolutionary religious and political ideas.

The political origins and standing of the Church of Scotland gave it power almost unique in Europe, for example allowing it to control the moral and religious behavior of all Scots through parish "kirk sessions." Yet this was fatally weakened by a Toleration Act in 1712 and by further splits between Protestant denominations (for example, in 1733), which continued to fragment the faith into the mid-nineteenth century. Vocal and sometimes violent anti-Catholicism also persisted throughout the early modern period.

Calvinist reformers placed education at the top of their agenda. A national system of parish schools was established by Parliament during the seventeenth century, giving Lowland Scots among the highest literacy levels in Europe by the mid-eighteenth century. Scots came to value education highly. Around 1790 Scotland had the highest ratio of universities per million inhabitants in Europe (3.3 per million; the figure was 0.2 for England, Wales, and Ireland, 0.9 for France). Early growth in university numbers was fueled by demand for training in Protestant theology, while its eighteenth-century expansion was principally associated with legal and medical education—Scotland's universities produced nine out of ten British medical graduates between 1750 and 1800. Student numbers rose from just over 1,000 to 4,400 between 1700 and 1820. Young men were attracted to Scotland's institutions of higher learning by important changes in teaching methods and curricula, and by the fact that Scotland was almost the only country in Europe where it became cheaper in real terms to attend university over the course of the eighteenth century. Thus Scotland's universities were much less elitist than Oxford or Cambridge and were becoming more socially inclusive during the eighteenth century.

Scotland's eighteenth-century universities represented the country to the world. Yet from the 1707 Union of Parliaments until 2000, Scotland had no representative assembly. At one level the Union of 1707 was part of a process of growing integration with and dependence on England. Links with England, regarded since the Middle Ages as the "auld [old] enemy," had been enhanced by the Union of the Crowns in 1603. James VI of Scotland (ruled 1567–1625) became James I of England (ruled 1603–1625) after the extinction of the Tudor dynasty with the death of Elizabeth I. James left the old royal palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh for the decidedly more lavish setting of London. From 1603 to 1714 the house of Stuart reigned over Scotland (as it had since 1371), England, Wales, and Ireland, albeit with a shift in the line of succession in 1689 when James VII of Scotland (James II of England) fled to France. The Union of the Crowns brought about important changes in the status of the border counties of England and Scotland, pacifying and integrating them into unified government structures, but in all other regards the nations remained distinct. The most important event integrating them was the Union of Parliaments in 1707.

Earlier attempts at integration, for example by the crown with its disastrous attempt to impose an Anglican prayer book on Scotland in 1637–1638 and by the Republican Oliver Cromwell with his forced union in the 1650s, had met with failure. In the early 1700s the mood of Scots remained decidedly Anglophobic, and the Union was constructed by elements of the ruling elite. "We are convinced that an Union will be of great advantage to both. The Protestant religion will be more firmly secured, the designs of our enemies effectually disappointed, and the riches and trade of the whole island advanced." So argued supporters of the Union. In exchange for giving up their own Parliament, they got 45 members in the 513-strong House of Commons and 16 representative peers in the House of Lords, both in London. Scotland was thereafter part of the "United Kingdom of Great Britain" and was managed by a succession of aristocratic patrons, notably the dukes of Argyll. For all that Scots prized an egalitarian ethos, theirs was not a politically democratic society. Scotland had only 3,000 county electors in 1788, and the burgh franchise was confined to town councils; Edinburgh's member of Parliament was elected by just thirty-three men.

While Queen Mary (wife of William of Orange and co-ruler with him 1689–1702) was a Stuart, the change of monarch in 1689 left many Scots (and some English) uneasy, feelings accentuated by the arrival of a Hanoverian monarch (George I) in 1714. This discontent provided support for the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Glorious failures as they may have been, the rebellions bound Scotland ever more closely into the political, military, and imperial destiny of her nearest neighbor.

Society

The defeat of the '45 also signaled important social changes. Lowland society had long been a "modern" one. Landowners were the elite. Land-ownership was concentrated in a few hands, and the "lairds" dominated the hierarchies of wealth, status, and political power. The men who attended Scotland's Parliament until 1707 were members of the landed nobility. Beneath them in the social hierarchy came the tenant farmers, along with their subtenants or "cottars" and servants, who worked the land that provided the bulk of wealth and wellbeing. In the Lowlands approximately a fifth of late-seventeenth-century rural dwellers were craftsmen and tradesmen. Until the eighteenth century the "middle class" was made up of prosperous tenants and small landowners in the countryside and the merchants of the larger towns. Then professionals came into their own—lawyers, doctors, and educators—along with the increasingly confident merchants and manufacturers spawned by the industrial and commercial revolutions.

Highland society was distinctive until the eighteenth century. The structure of landholding was superficially similar, but Highland society was based on very different premises, which were increasingly alien to Lowlanders and to the English. Highland nobles were not just landlords, but also chiefs, in charge of clans built on the bonds created by feuding and feasting. The crown used clan rivalries to extend its hold on the Highlands, most notably in the notorious massacre of Mac Donalds by Campbells at Glencoe in 1692. Weakened by political and economic change since the sixteenth century, the cultural framework of clans was not finally dismantled until after the failure of the 1745 Jacobite rising. In its aftermath the wearing of Highland dress and the carrying of bagpipes were banned, except for Highland regiments abroad.

The early modern Highlands were densely peopled, and indeed the distribution of Scotland's population was very different from that of the present day. As late as the mid-eighteenth century more than half of Scotland's people lived north of an imaginary Highland Line drawn from just south of Aberdeen to just north of Glasgow. In common with most northern Europeans except the Dutch, Scots were country dwellers. Just 3 percent lived in towns of 10,000 or more in 1500. However, the rate of urbanization was the fastest in Europe in the eighteenth century. Just one Scot in twenty lived in a large town in 1700, compared with one in six by 1800. The most rapid eighteenth-century growth occurred in Glasgow and neighboring towns in the west-central Lowlands, the former on the back of the colonial tobacco trade, the latter mostly thanks to textile manufacturing.

Until the eighteenth century population figures are largely guesswork. Scotland may have had 700,000 people around 1500 and perhaps one million by about 1700, though most of the growth probably took place between about 1540 and 1640; the first accurate census in 1801 showed there were 1.6 million people. Scotland's population growth rate was slower than elsewhere in the British Isles—strikingly so in the eighteenth century because Scottish women married later than did their English and Irish counterparts, and a larger proportion never married during their childbearing years. Slow growth occurred despite the fact that adults began to live much longer in the eighteenth century. Life expectancy at the age of twenty-five years rose from twenty-eight years in the early seventeenth century to thirty-eight years by the end of the eighteenth century. Apart from low fertility and high mortality, the other reason was substantial emigration, this usually of young men for military or mercantile service. The North Sea and Baltic countries had always been important destinations for Scots (as had England), but the main goal in the seventeenth century was Ireland and in the eighteenth the Atlantic and Caribbean colonies.

The redistribution of population to the west central Lowlands in general and the rise of Glasgow in particular marked a profound shift in the economic focus of Scotland's wealth and overseas trade. In the Middle Ages both had centered on the east coast, Scots looking to the North Sea and the Baltic; then the emphasis changed to the west, focusing on the Atlantic economies. Scotland's agriculture had always been less developed than that of England, but the second half of the eighteenth century saw dramatic improvements in arable farming, which brought rural productivity onto a par with the best in Europe. Industry, until then located mainly in the countryside, became more identifiably urban and began to diversify from textiles and other "organic" economies (using, for example, leather and wood) into mineral-based production of coal and metals. Scotland had already become more dependent on her southern neighbor for trade by the end of the seventeenth century, and experienced agricultural and industrial revolutions at the same time as England a century later.

Yet for all the convergences of experience, Scotland was in many ways a very different country from England even in 1800. There was fiscal integration with England from 1707, but Scotland's legal systems, educational framework, religious establishment, and even currency—the pound (£) Scots was worth about one twelfth of the pound (£) sterling and the Bank of Scotland was a separate foundation in 1695.The trading privileges of her royal burghs were preserved distinct from England's at the Union of Parliaments. Key social institutions also differed. For example, poor relief was discretionary and recipients had less clearly defined rights than in England; it was usually supplementary and therefore meager; there were fewer institutions like work-houses, which existed mainly in some of the larger towns.

Culture

Within Scotland's borders considerable social and cultural diversity also persisted. Highland literacy was much lower than Lowland because most people there spoke Gaelic, not Scots (a West Germanic tongue similar to English). Gaelic was the first language of half of Scotland in the fifteenth century, a third in 1689, but just a fifth in 1806. Linguistic variety did not end there, for all of Scotland was becoming more Anglicized. Scots itself had flourished as a literary medium in the late Middle Ages (c. 1480–1520) but was in retreat thereafter as standard court Scots fragmented into regional dialects after the departure of James VI in 1603. Anglicization of language and culture proceeded in the eighteenth century. The literati of Enlightenment Edinburgh aspired to pronunciation and orthography that conformed to the best London practice, and it was English rather than Scots that became the tongue of Scotland's landed, professional, and aspirant mercantile classes.

Edinburgh was the crucible of the Scottish Enlightenment, which also flourished in the universities, drawing rooms, and clubs of Glasgow and Aberdeen. Scotland's enlightened thinkers and writers—Adam Smith and David Hume, to name but two—were of worldwide significance, bound together by a shared faith in the improvability of individual and society through education, reason, and discussion. They celebrated and promoted commercial change, including an early consumer revolution, by arguing that economic cooperation and exchange would promote sociability, refinement, and "taste." Scotland's Enlightenment was far more vigorous, socially diverse, and influential than England's.

While Scotland ended the early modern period closely integrated with England and tied up in its industrial, commercial, and imperial future, its independent evolution and effects on England (and Ireland) in the early modern period illustrate that different parts of the United Kingdom influenced each other's development. Through contacts with Europe and the Atlantic world, Scotland also exerted a wider influence over space and time. Aspects of the educational system developed in the seventeenth century, political theories expounded at the Reformation and after, the ideas aired in the Scottish Enlightenment, and Scotland's interpretation of Calvinist theology and some of the practices of church organization and discipline are all examples of an enduring international impact of her early modern development.

Bibliography

Houston, R. A., and W. W. J. Knox, eds. The New Penguin History of Scotland: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day. London, 2001. A comprehensive, up-to-date and readable overview.

—R. A. HOUSTON

This entry is a subtopic of British Isles.

In Scotland food and food traditions have, as elsewhere, changed over time while regional influences have had a major effect. In addition, both Europe and Scandinavia have introduced changes in the food of the country. Geography has played a central role in determining the basic foodstuffs and their place in the diet. The country is divided into two areas, the Highlands in the north and west, and the Lowlands in the south and east. Each has its own distinct language and culture. The Highlands are generally a mountainous region, with an emphasis on pastoral activities, livestock husbandry, crofting (small acreage farming), general agriculture, and maritime activities. The Lowlands are the chief agricultural area.

Beginning with the Agricultural Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the area developed specialized agricultural districts. The east is predominantly an area of arable and crop production; the climate of the west makes it suitable for the raising of livestock. The major towns and cities are located in this region, between the Firths of Forth and Clyde. These two areas are divided into smaller ones. The South-West, including the Inner Hebrides, is a dairying area; the East and South-East are advanced grain-cropping areas with a European reputation for farming; the North-East is a stock rearing area, especially for beef; the Highlands and Islands are another stock area.

A number of foods and foodstuffs have been important in the Scottish diet. Cereals have played a central role, especially in rural areas. Bere, a barley, was the traditional grain. By the end of the seventeenth century, it was being rapidly supplanted by oats. Beginning in the eighteenth century oats came to be recognized as a mark of Scottish nationality. As its consumption grew, bere fell down the social scale, though it continued to be eaten in Caithness and Orkney in the early twentieth century. Bere and oats were eaten in a number of ways. Oatmeal was milled into a number of "cuts" or grades, used for specific dishes. It was the basis of brose (mixed with water to make an instant food), porridge (cooked with water or milk), and such foods as sowens and skirley (mixed with fat and onion). Oatmeal was an ingredient in dishes such as haggis (mixed with liver and suet, traditionally cooked in a sheep's stomach). It was baked into bannocks and oatcakes, often toasted over an open fire.

Wheat was a grain grown in only the most favored areas and sold as a cash crop. Wheat bread was at first a prestigious food, eaten by the higher classes; for the lower classes it was eaten on special occasions such as harvesting. In the late eighteenth century, it spread from the towns and cities, where it was accompanied by the rise in baker's shops. Peas and beans were bread crops. Especially in the Lowlands, they were made into meal, but also put into dishes such as broths. These grains also indicated social class, and by the seventeenth century they were confined to the poorer people.

Baking

These grains, especially oats and wheat, were used in the tradition of baking, for which Scotland has become renowned. From oats, bannocks, scones, and oatcakes were baked. These did not use raising agents. From wheat, cakes, pastry, and shortbread were oven-baked. This was a later development, owing to the late introduction of the oven and the initial high cost of sugar.

Potatoes

The potato was introduced as a novelty in the late seventeenth century. In the 1740s there was resistance against eating it. By the 1790s when the "Statistical Account of Scotland" was compiled, it had become an important element of the diet, especially in Highland areas and among the poorer classes of the Lowlands. It was a principal food in the diet and was a cheap and healthy food and a substitute for bread. The potato continued to be an important element and only declined in status in the 1990s in the face of increased use of pasta and rice. Traditionally potatoes were boiled, with or without their skins. In the urban diet of the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century and beyond, they were sliced and deep-fat fried as chips. They were eaten as a meal, as a side dish in a main meal, or as an ingredient in a wide range of dishes such as soups and stews; they were also used in baking, as in potato scones.

Fruits and Vegetables

Fruit and vegetables had a relatively small role in the diet. The traditional staple vegetable was kale, a member of the Brassica varieties. Vegetable gardening around the houses of noblemen and lairds, and the rise of market gardening in the vicinity of the large towns, especially from the eighteenth century onwards, meant the development of a wide range of vegetables. Like other foodstuffs, they were at first eaten by the wealthy classes, then spread to the social classes below. Traditionally they were consumed as broth. Fruit was not extensively grown, and a limited number of varieties were raised. Orchard fruit was little cultivated, though soft fruit, especially strawberries and raspberries, has been commercially grown from the late eighteenth century; fruit was supplied from kitchen gardens. Especially where domestic production was limited or not undertaken, fruit growing wild in nature provided an important source. It could be a fruit substitute, as were rosehips during World War II. Fruit was eaten raw, or made into dishes, puddings, sauces, and drinks, including alcoholic ones. When sugar became available, it was made into conserves, jams, and jellies, or was bottled.

Dairy Products

Milk and dairy products have had a number of roles. Much of the supply has been from cows; that from ewes and goats has been minor. Milk has always been an important element in the rural diet. In urban areas and near towns, the supply was traditionally inadequate, though small town dairies filled a gap. Supplies had a seasonal fluctuation. Milk could be processed into dishes such as Corstorphine cream, made from frothed whey. Cheese-making enabled surplus quantities of milk to be utilized, especially in districts located away from centers of population. A large number of regional recipes and varieties exist, some developed during the expansion of the dairy industry in the nineteenth century. The Highlands are associated with soft cheeses for rapid consumption such as crowdie; the Lowlands have longer-keeping hard cheeses. Butter was the only source of fat in the rural diet, though beef or mutton fat could be obtained.

Meat, Fowl, and Fish

Meat was a foodstuff associated with social status. Among the rural population in the 1790s, it was rarely eaten. Even by the 1840s, it was still not an everyday foodstuff, especially among the poor. Before the Agricultural Revolution, livestock were slaughtered at Martinmas (November 11) as not all animals could be overwintered. Meat from domesticated livestock was supplemented by wild game and animals such as rabbits and hares. Sea fowl was caught in coastal areas. The nobility consumed large quantities of meat, especially on days when rents were paid: payment was made in-kind, of which livestock formed a major element.

There were regional variations in the types of meat consumed. The keeping of pigs became prevalent with the spread of potato growing in the eighteenth century. At that time, mutton became a meat of social distinction, being confined to the higher classes in the Lowlands, and the lower classes in the Highlands and Islands.

All parts of animals were utilized, as food, or as non-food items, such as tallow for lighting or hides and leather goods. Mealy puddings were made from entrails; blood was mixed with oatmeal to form blood puddings (black pudding); heads and trotters from sheep were made into pie and soup stock (powsoddie). Meat was rarely eaten fresh. It was salted, dried, or pickled in brine.

Fish was primarily eaten in coastal regions. With the improvement of transport networks in the nineteenth century, consumption spread to inland regions. Fish was a central element of the diet: it was a subsistence food, it filled the hungry gap before harvest when food was in short supply, and it was a delicacy. The Western Isles and Islands had large quantities of herring, haddock, whiting, and mackerel. Other fish included salmon, cod, ling, and shellfish such as cockles and oysters; around the Orkney Islands, whale was plentiful. Coalfish was widely eaten among the working classes. Inland fish such as trout were caught. Fish were eaten fresh, dried, or smoked. A number of fish dishes, many local in nature, are food identity markers: kippers, salted and smoke-cured fish, usually herring, first developed in Newcastle in the 1840s; salt-pickled herring or Finnan haddock, a lightly salted and smoked haddock; Arbroath smokies, salt-dried and smoked haddock.

Birds and poultry include domestic poultry, especially hens and geese. Their eggs were eaten, as were those of wild fowl. In some districts such as Ness, in the Outer Hebrides, wild bird flesh was eaten from gannets.

Some foods have become associated with geographical areas (see Table 1).

Beverages

The traditional drink crop was bere or barley. Ale was drunk, especially in Lowland areas; in the Highlands, whiskey was distilled, both legally and illicitly. Hot drinks spread from the upper classes. Tea drinking started to become increasingly widespread by the 1790s, though for some time afterwards it remained a drink for special occasions among lower social classes. Cocoa was drunk, as were coffee substitutes such as chicory. Coffee was not a drink of the working class, and even among industrial workers in Edinburgh in the 1950s it was consumed rarely, if at all. In recent decades coffee has increasingly taken the place of tea, among all social classes.

Special Foods for Special Occasions

Special foods were eaten during festivals. They were specially prepared; they often had ingredients with a certain significance (such as flour from the last sheaf) or were made with ingredients that were expensive, difficult to obtain, or not eaten at other times of the year. Some dishes were served only at a festive occasion, or during part of it, others were not.

Table 1

Festivals took place around the Celtic Calendar. They were held at the quarters that marked the passing of one season to another (Beltane, Lammas, Whitsun, and Martinmas). Foods included bannocks and oatcakes. Others were associated with the Gregorian Calendar. Hogmany, New Year's Eve, on December 31, was and probably still is the most widely celebrated of all the calendar festivals. Many of its foods were sweet in nature. Shortbread was a rich textured biscuit of flour, sugar, and butter. This could be decorated with a sugar iced or embossed pattern. Pitcaithly bannock was decorated with crystallized lemon and orange peel, caraway comfits, and almonds. Black bun is a rich and spiced dried fruit cake enclosed within a thin casing of bread dough or pastry. During harvest, harvesters were given wheat bread and ale; harvest meals also celebrated the end of harvest.

Rites of passage had foods associated with them. These included many common foods, with special attributes, such as bread, cheese, bannocks, and whiskey.

Meal Times and Menus

Meals had distinct patterns. Eating times were shaped by class, occupation, work hours, and days of the week. In rural areas meals were arranged around the feeding of livestock.

Three main meals were eaten: breakfast in the morning, dinner in the middle of the day, and tea or supper at five or six in the evening. The main meal was dinner; supper was fairly light but could also be substantial. Although traditionally no food was eaten between meals, changing mealtimes led to the evolution of the high tea, taken in the late afternoon, around four o'clock. It filled the gap between dinner and the evening meal. It developed as tea drinking became popular, especially among the upper classes. By the 1890s sweet and chocolate biscuits were becoming popular additions to the high tea. Meals had a number of courses. Dinner was three courses: a soup, a main course, and what was called a pudding. This varied: if there was soup, there might be no pudding; if there was no soup, the pudding was more substantial.

The eating of dishes, especially the main meal, had a weekly cycle. Sunday, the Sabbath, was reserved for churchgoing for Protestants and Catholics. (Other faiths had their Sabbaths on different days.) On this day meat was eaten. It was roasted, served with dumplings, and accompanied by potatoes and cooked vegetables. The byproducts and leftovers of the Sunday dinner were eaten throughout the working week.

Menus of daily meals are recorded in household accounts, personal and travel diaries, letters, and cookery books. According to Alexander Fenton, house-servants in the 1790s had "breakfast of oatmeal porridge or sowens with milk; dinner of broth and boiled meat warm twice a week, or of re-heated broth, or milk, with cold meat, or of eggs, cheese, butter, and bread of mixed barley and pease-meal; supper was for breakfast, or in winter there might be boiled potatoes mashed with a little butter and milk" (Scottish Country Life, p. 170). Ian Carter notes that in North-East Scotland during the 1840s, "the usual food of the farm servants [farm workers] is porridge and milk for breakfast: for dinner, potatoes, bread and milk with perhaps oatmeal brose made with greens, for supper. They do not have beer, except when there is a deficiency of milk. In harvest time an allowance of beer is given then" (Farm Life in Northeast Scotland, 1979, pp. 132–133).

Food and the diet have been influenced by a number of factors. Agriculture and changes within it led to changes in agricultural practices and the introduction and spread of new crops and markets. These affected the crops and livestock raised, their quantities, and seasonal availability. Trade and contact with other countries introduced foods, dishes, food habits, names of dishes, and methods of cooking. These were especially noted from the Netherlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Political and cultural links have been important, like those from the Auld Alliance with France, which started in the eleventh century and had its greatest impact in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It introduced dishes cooked "in the French way," such as "beef alamonde," dishes such as "omlit of eggs," terminology such as "gigot," a leg of mutton or lamb, and cooking utensils such as the "ashet," a dish for serving meat.

Union with England

Scotland was politically influenced by its larger neighbor, England. The two countries were joined in 1603 by a union of Crowns, then a Union of Parliaments in 1707. These brought the countries closer and shifted the power structure. The English Court influenced the food and eating habits of the nobility. Cultural influences came from the English diet and the introduction of such dishes as roast beef, mutton, and lamb.

Immigrants influenced the native food culture. From those of the sixth to the twelfth centuries, the Scandinavians influenced the use of resources from the sea and introduced dishes such as fish and mustard. Large-scale immigration took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from Ireland, Italy, and India. Italians were noted for fish and chips and ice cream, with all their traditions of these foods. Italian specialty shops such as Valvona and Corolla are a noted feature of some cities such as Edinburgh, where there is a large Italian population.

Social changes created a demand for new foods. Food substitutes, such as margarine, developed around 1870, allowed for greater variation in the diet. So too did new methods of food preservation, such as canning, from the 1860s; refrigeration was first applied to meat imported from the United States in the 1880s; pasteurization was first used in the dairy industry around 1890. These also reduced the influence of season and locality.

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