ABSTRACT

The last national famine in Scotland occurred during the 1690s, a decade in which much of the population of northern Europe was subject to high food prices and subsistence crises. During this period, described in Scotland as the ‘Seven Ill Years’, and by Jacobite contemporaries as ‘King William’s Ill Years’, a significant proportion of the population experienced increased hardship, scarcity, dearth and famine. Despite its now infamous title, the famine certainly did not nationally extend across seven years, but it is not unreasonable to suggest that famine-related suffering may have.1 It was a crisis which hit the poorest and weakest members of society hardest, the effects of which were felt by different ranks of society into the early 1700s. Across much of northern Europe, adverse weather conditions during the coldest decade of the ‘Little Ice Age’ had a detrimental bearing upon the crucial grain crops instigating harvest failure. Diminishing crop yields and localised shortages were identified in parts of Scotland as early as the late 1680s and early 1690s. Nationally, increased food prices resulting from grain shortages caused famine which extended from the harvest of 1695 to that of 1700, with critical harvest failures in 1695, 1696 and 1698. Local authorities and the government struggled to cope with the resultant overwhelming social and economic problems. As crop yields dropped and people were forced to eat seed corn in order to survive, tenants on some estates unable to pay their rents were thrown off the land. Others riddled with years of debt and limited prospects for the coming years simply fled, sometimes to neighbouring estates where landlords were prepared to offer favourable terms to have someone work the land, or to Ireland where cheap rentals were available in crisis-free Ulster. Scotland’s relatively weak economy depended on grain exports, which were banned as grain levels within the country plummeted. The failure of this move, and the removal of duty from

1 Although this was the last national famine, it was unlikely that this was the worst ever experienced by the Scottish population. The previous dearth of 1674/75 was of much shorter duration and had a much more limited impact, but the crises of the 1620s and 1590s may have been more serious than that of the 1690s. However, current research on famine in early modern Scotland is limited and many conclusions remain speculative in this absence. For further details of the seventeenth-century famines see M. Flinn et al, Scottish Population History from the Seventeenth Century to the 1930s (Cambridge, 1977).