ABSTRACT
Any figures for the population of medieval Scotland are pure guesswork. There is no equivalent of Domesday Book or the fourteenth-century English lay subsidies to provide even a rough basis from which calculations can be made, nothing before the hearth tax returns of the 1690s. Population estimates have been made by assuming a ratio between the carrying capacity of Scotland and England of around 1:6. The pitfalls of such an approach hardly require emphasis. Nevertheless, using this and other estimates it is possible to suggest that Scotland may have had a population of around one million by the early fourteenth century. Indirect evidence such as the creation of new settlements and the expansion of cultivation limits shows that, as over most of Western Europe, Scotland’s population increased substantially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, possibly reaching a peak in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. At this time overall densities may have been around 35 persons per square mile. While this may seem low, average population densities were only slightly greater in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when a greater proportion of the population was concentrated in the towns. Medieval Scotland then was hardly an empty country. Many areas must have been as well populated in the early fourteenth century as they are today. Indeed some districts, especially in the north, may have supported more people than in later times.
