When you think of the clearances you think of beauty and tears combined.
You think of highland glens; stunning, but remote and desolate
You never for a minute expect me to bring you
to Airdrie but today I want to say what
they don t say about the Clearances If you re interested in the people,
places and events in Scottish history, then click the subscribe
button at the bottom right of the screen. In the meantime, let me tell you a story
Whenever you hear the word clearances, immediately before it you expect Highland and yet
Look along post-industrial Airdrie High St today and you d never think
of this as a clearance location. We get so distracted by the horrific
brutality I ve described when Patrick Seller cleared land for the Duke of Sutherland,
that we lose sight of the larger numbers cleared from places like this.
Over a series of videos I d like to talk about some of the issues raised in a highly readable
book called The Lowland Clearances by Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell.
I ll leave a link in the description. Today it s the overarching changes that affected
ordinary people, through the centuries, and I can t think of a better place to do it
than what you might perceive as industrial Lanarkshire.
but Airdrie hasn t always been like this.
In 1160 Malcolm IV of Scotland gave these lands to the monks of Newbattle Abbey , which
was an offshoot of Melrose Abbey. That s why Airdrie, Coatbridge and
surrounds are called Monklands. This is Airdrie High St.
Where s the Jenners? Where s the Gucci, Where s the Prada?
It looks more working class residential , and it is,
but it literally was the high street on which those monks built the Edinburgh to Glasgow road
above the boggy low ground down there.
Medieval gave way to renaissance, the reformation came and went, but in many ways
rural life remained unchanged and this was the location of rural life.
and farming would have been pretty much the same whether you were in the Highlands or the Lowlands
Airdrie was a fermtoun that developed around here
A small community of families lived and worked together.
They would each have a strip of land, or a rig, to cultivate in the infield near to their houses.
Further away, the open outfield was used for common grazing for their animals.
Their animals grazed in common, and they rented the land through common tenancies
from the lord in his castle. They called this system
of mutual co-operative farming runrig... after a popular Highland rock band.
They paid their rent in kind and service. So many eggs or butter or bolls of wheat or
days of ploughing or you get the picture. In the 18th century things were changing.
At first, down in Galloway, the landowners brought in change with a haste and severity that created
a backlash I ll cover in another video. From then on, the clearances in the Lowlands
were carried out with stealth, legal niceties and a marketing campaign.
The landowners weren t clearing , they were improving.
In this area it wasn t the Duke of Sutherland, but the Duke of Hamilton,
and the factor wasn t Patrick Seller, but John Burrel.
So Imagine it s the second half of the 17th century.
You re a tenant on the Duke of Hamilton s estates. Maybe even on this land that s now Central Park.
His factor John Burrel has a plan. It s a plan that many others will follow
across the Lowlands before the Highland Clearances wipe that people and culture from the land.
Instead of short-term community leases, with you and your neighbours farming your little rigs,
and sharing common ground, the factor would choose one
member of the community. They would be given a much longer,
nineteen-year, lease for all of the land. In return for this longer lease
they ll have to improve the land. Land that ll now be enclosed rather than open
and you ll probably be paying in cash rather than kind.
Most of you will no longer be farmers, but wage labourers.
You ll work on the land leased to the successful one who s given the tenancy.
Walls will have to be built to enclose the previously communal land,
and people will be needed to build those walls to keep themselves out.
Some of you will move over to weaving or fishing or whatever other means of making money
because you ll no longer be growing, breeding, gathering or milking your own food.
You no longer depend on the bounty of nature, but the generosity of the market rate.
Some will trust to the kindness of the ocean in a wave of emigration.
Of course, the laird doesn t want everyone to leave.
He ll need your labour at certain times of year, to sew
or for harvest, so he wants you close buy for those times.
Depending on the time, district, property held and structure of the parliamentary seats
he might also need some of you when it came to voting him back into parliament
to enact the laws that would determine your future, ensure the security of his class
or enforce the servitude of yours. CR So planned villages were established
by landowners to house the workers. You ll see lots of them up and down the
country. Stanley, Grangemouth, Granton on Spey, Balfron, New Lanark and more
One of the features you ll often see in these planned villages
is that the front door opens on to the main street rather than having a front garden.
This was to make sure that the house s midden
had to be in the back garden and wasn t visible in the front street.
Now these planned villages weren t built for altruistic purposes, but they did
give some of the newly landless workers a relief valve and roof above their heads.
Airdrie wasn t one of these new planned towns. Sixty or seventy years before Robert Hamilton of
Airdrie was the local nobleman. Now he s a pub
but he persuaded parliament to pass an act allowing four fairs a year to be held here.
Airdrie was becoming a merket toun. Anyway you re in luck because when the
landlord was looking for a new tenant for a long lease, he chose you.
I might say you ve won a watch, but you earned it.
Your hard work, good behaviour and conformity in the past are paying dividends.
It s not everyone that can keep their head down and tug their forelock at the same time.
Incidentally if you want to help keep the channel going you can buy
coffees to help support us. I ll leave a link for that in the description
Now some of the others who didn t get the lease were also hard working, conscientious,
determined and well behaved, but John Burrel chose you.
In some ways the hard work s only just starting. You see part of the lease
are a set of conditions, dictating when you lime the soil,
how much land you need to bring into cultivation, how you rotate the crops, how many fallow years,
even what crops you grow Oh and rents will rise
so you HAVE to make this farm more productive and you ve got 19 years to do it...
but at least you re not a wage labourer are you. They don t get to share in productivity
in fact there ll be years of want when you have to hand over the grain you ve
grown for the landlord to export. It ll travel through towns like this,
where some of your erstwhile colleagues now live, on its way to England or mainland Europe
as they look hungrily on. Some of them will be so hungry
that they might search the fields after harvest to glean any leftovers missed.
They might have gone into the woods and collected dead wood to use in hearth and home ,
but whilst this used to be permitted it was now seen as pilfering
and by 1780 there would be a law against it passed by your MP in parliament
But not every year is one of hunger. As the 18th century progressed towards the
19th century grain prices increased, wages also increased,
but even in good growing years those who kept a small stock of beasts
could no longer graze them on common land , because common land was now enclosed.
But you still have your land at least until your 19 year lease is up.
Then you have to hope that you ve improved the land enough to get another lease.
Hopefully you ve not improved it so much that you can t afford the new lease.
Under Burrel s stewardship the value of the Duke s lands soared.
You COULD be working for somebody else to outbid you into a homeless retiral
and you may have to follow others into wage labouring, or some other trade in the town here.
Maybe you ll be forced, as some of them were, to sail the Atlantic Ocean and start all over again.
Of course, you may well manage to survive to gain another lease.
Your children may grow to take on a lease after you.
They might watch people flock south from the Highlands when they re cleared from their land,
swelling the town of Airdrie as they come to work in Lanarkshire coal mining
and industry commemorated
at the Summerlee Museum of Scottish Industrial Life here in Coatbridge.
Maybe you, or your children will be part of the next wave to sail the oceans.
Maybe they ll see the radicalisation of Weavers as the industrial revolution moves THEM
off their spinning wheels into long hours of noisy factory labour
maybe they ll watch some of those radicals tried and deported to Australia
or they ll live through the church schism that will create the Free Church of Scotland
as folks rebel against imposition of clergy
by those very lords and masters who put people off their land.
Maybe they ll join others from that free church in the John Wickliffe or the Philip Laing
as they sail to New Zealand to build that new Jerusalem in Otago
They might stay here as the countryside gives way to coal mining and the land that was
fermtouns changes to a more industrial landscape. Their descendants will see Monklands specifically,
and North Lanarkshire in general become part of that industrial
central belt that we recognise today. Coal mines, steel works, hard grafting hard men,
and even harder women. I say that we recognise today
of course I mean that we remember today. Do you know the Proclaimers song Letter
from America?
I d be interested to know in the comments how many of you have heard the song.
I remember having an argument with an English mate because he could neither see nor care that it was
about clearance then and now and deindustrialisation.
If you didn t realise that then take a listen to it again.
In order to facilitate improvement folks had been moved from the
farming economy to the wage economy only for their heirs to inherit the move
from wage economy to dole queue to facilitate further efficiency
and the transition to modern day Monklands was complete.
What about the folks who left for those new worlds, to own their own lands in Australia,
New Zealand Canada, America. How many are independent land
owners today, and how many are just wage labourers in sunnier climes.
Of course there HAVE been improvements and economic change and nothing stands still.
The purpose of this video was to point out that clearance and dispossession
wasn t a one-off event in the Highlands,
but a continuing activity down the centuries with winners and losers.
Change is inevitable In the late 18th and early 19th centuries
some would say that who won and who lost in that change had that same inevitability.
They ll still tell you that today... if you let them.
There ll be a video on another aspect of clearance coming up on screen now.
In the meantime tha mi an d chas gum bi lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.