ABSTRACT
Many questions regarding early-modern Scottish society remain unanswered, such as the role of kinship, patterns of debt, credit and inheritance, social mobility, and the ways in which communities were affected by the impact of agricultural change. We are still unclear even about basic frameworks like patterns of landownership and the distribution of wealth. Nor have there been many detailed studies of individual communities of the kind which has added so much to our understanding of rural life in early-modern England, Nevertheless, it is clear that Scottish society exhibited important differences from, but also some significant parallels with, contemporary England.
