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History Scotland’s consultant editor, Dr Allan Kennedy, discusses the devastating famine that ravaged Scotland in the 1690s, interpreted by some as divine punishment on the nation for the recent overthrow of James VII
The famine of the 1690s
The 1690s have conventionally been seen as a peculiarly unhappy time for Scotland. The horrors of the first Jacobite rising (1689-91) and the massacre of Glencoe (1692) are part of this narrative, as is the catastrophe of the Darien disaster (1699-1700) and the significant disruption caused by the Nine Years War (1688-97). But for most Scots, the misery of the 1690s likely lay in a more immediate threat: famine.
The famine was caused by a succession of poor harvests, culminating in a period of near-total harvest failures between 1695 and 1700. Climactic factors were likely to blame, since the 1690s was one of the coldest, wettest decades Europe had known, representing a particular nadir of the ‘little ice age’. Scotland, with its northerly latitude and heavy reliance on more-or-less subsistence agriculture, was especially vulnerable. Widespread scarcity followed, although not uniformly: highland and upland areas seem to have been very badly affected by dearth, as was the lowland northeast, but much of central and southern Scotland, while certainly experiencing shortages, likely did not tip into full-scale famine. Local experiences varied, therefore, but this was still a disaster on a national scale.
Horrific suffering – through starvation, but also thanks to the weakening effects of malnutrition – was the inevitable result.The nightmarish impact was most memorably summed by the geographer Sir Robert Sibbald in 1699:
The Bad Seasons these several Years bypast, hath made so much Scarcity and so great a Dearth, that forWant, some Die by theWay-side, some drop down in the Streets, the poor sucking Babes are Starving for want of Milk, which the empty Breasts of their Mothers cannot furnish them: Every one may see Death in the Face of the Poor, that abound every where; the Thinness of theirVisage, their Ghostly Looks, their Feebleness, their Agues and their Fluxes, threaten them with sudden Death.
Alongside the sickness and death described by Sibbald, the famine caused an uptick in emigration as people sought relief overseas. Some individuals likely ended up in England, and others may have sailed to America or Europe, but the most significant emigrate destination was Ulster, which absorbed perhaps as many as 50,000 Scots during the 1690s. Between starvation and emigration, the famine, it has been estimated, caused Scotland to lose between ten and fifteen per cent of its population – a devastating loss from which it would take decades to recover.
The seriousness of the famine’s consequences can be explained, in part, by the weakness of the official response.The government of William II was not completely idle, and on several occasions it attempted to relieve suffering by importing grain from overseas. But there was no systematic effort to provide large-scale support, and provision was instead left largely to Scotland’s pre-existing poor-relief system. This was based around voluntary alms-giving at the parish level, and it had hitherto proved a reasonably effective means of tackling day-to-day poverty. It was, however, completely overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the crisis, and moreover it had never been designed to handle the high levels of mobility among the destitute that accompanied the famine. With government backing, some parishes responded to the squeeze by imposing local taxes to top-up their poor-relief coffers, but even this was woefully insufficient. In fact, no adequate means of providing for the poor and starving was ever developed.
This woeful failure of governance contributed towards the collapse of William II’s reputation in Scotland. A king who, in 1689, had been held up as a liberator, rescuing Scotland from the despotism of James VII, was by the time he died in 1702 widely seen as little less than an enemy of Scotland and Scottish interests. There were many reasons for this, but resentment over the famine response was certainly among them. The king thus paid a heavy price for his inability to shield Scots from the effects of their last nationwide famine.