The economy of Scotland in the Middle Ages covers all forms of economic activity in the modern boundaries of Scotland, between the End of Roman rule in Britain in the early fifth century, until the advent of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century, including agriculture, crafts and trade. Having between a fifth or sixth (15-20%) of the arable or good pastoral land and roughly the same amount of coastline as England and Wales, marginal pastoral agriculture and fishing were two of the most important aspects of the Medieval Scottish economy. With poor communications, in the early Middle Ages most settlements needed to achieve a degree of self-sufficiency in agriculture. Most farms were operated by a family unit and used an infield and outfield system.
Arable farming grew in the High Middle Ages and agriculture entered a period of relative boom between the thirteenth century and late fifteenth century. Unlike England, Scotland had no towns dating from times of Roman Britain. From the twelfth century there are records of burghs, chartered towns, which became major centre of crafts and trade. There are also Scottish coins, although English coinage probably remained more significant in trade, and until the end of the period barter was probably the most common form of exchange. Craft and industry remained relatively undeveloped before the end of the Middle Ages and, although there were extensive trading networks based in Scotland, while the Scots exported largely raw materials, they imported increasing quantities of luxury goods, resulting in a bullion shortage and perhaps helping to create a financial crisis in the fifteenth century.
Background
Scotland is roughly half the size of England and Wales and has approximately the same amount of coastline, but only between a fifth and a sixth of the amount of the arable or good pastoral land, under 60 metres above sea level, and most of this is located in the south and east. This made marginal pastoral farming and fishing the key factors in the pre-modern economy.E. Gemmill and N. J. Mayhew, Changing Values in Medieval Scotland: a Study of Prices, Money, and Weights and Measures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), , pp. 8–10. Its north Atlantic position means that it has very heavy rainfall, which encouraged the spread of blanket peat bog, the acidity of which, combined with high level of wind and salt spray, made most of the western islands treeless. The existence of hills, mountains, quicksands and marshes made internal communication and conquest extremely difficult.C. Harvie, Scotland: a Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), , pp. 10–11.
After the departure of the Romans from Northern Britain, in the fifth century four major circles of influence had emerged in what is now Scotland. In the east were the Picts, whose kingdoms eventually stretched from the river Forth to Shetland; in the west the Gaelic (Goidelic)-speaking people of Dál Riata with their royal fortress at Dunadd in Argyll, with close links with the island of Ireland, from which they brought with them the name Scots; in the south was the British (Brythonic) Kingdom of Alt Clut, descendants of the peoples of the Roman-influenced kingdoms of "The Old North"; finally, there were the Angles who had overrun much of southern Britain and held the Kingdom of Bernicia (later the northern part of Northumbria), in the south-east.J. R. Maddicott and D. M. Palliser, eds, The Medieval State: essays presented to James Campbell (London: Continuum, 2000), , p. 48. This situation was transformed from the eighth century when ferocious Viking raids began. Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles eventually fell to the Norsemen.W. E. Burns, A Brief History of Great Britain (Infobase Publishing, 2009), , pp. 44–5. These threats may have speeded a long-term process of gaelicisation of the Pictish kingdoms, which adopted Gaelic language and customs and which probably facilitated a merger of the Gaelic and Pictish crowns. This culminated in the rise of Cínaed mac Ailpín (Kenneth MacAlpin) in the 840s, which brought to power the House of Alpin, who became the leaders of a combined Gaelic-Pictish kingdom, known as the Kingdom of Alba and later as Scotland.B. Yorke, The Conversion of Britain: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain c.600–800 (Pearson Education, 2006), , p. 54.
From the sixth century, Scotland experienced a process of Christianisation, traditionally seen as carried out by Irish-Scots missionaries, including St Ninian, St Kentigern and St Columba and to a lesser extent those from Rome and England.R. A. Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (University of California Press, 1999), , pp. 231–3. However, Gilbert Markus highlights the fact that most of these figures were not church-founders, but were usually active in areas where Christianity had already become established, probably through gradual diffusion that is almost invisible in the historical record. This would have included trade, conquest and intermarriage.G. Markus, "Conversion to Christianity", in M. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), , pp. 78–9.
There are almost no written sources from which to re-construct the demography of Medieval Scotland. Estimates have been for the early period made of a population of 10,000 inhabitants in Dál Riata and 80–100,000 for Pictland, which was probably the largest region.L. R. Laing, The Archaeology of Celtic Britain and Ireland, c. AD 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), , pp. 21–2. From the formation of the Kingdom of Alba in the tenth century, to before the Black Death reached the country in 1349, estimates based on the amount of farmable land, suggest that population may have grown from half a million to a million.R. E. Tyson, "Population Patterns", in M. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (New York, 2001), pp. 487–8. Although there is no reliable documentation on the impact of the plague, if the pattern followed that in England, then the population may have fallen to as low as half a million by the end of the fifteenth century.S. H. Rigby, ed., A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), , pp. 109–11.
Agriculture
In the early Middle Ages, poor transport forced self-sufficiency on small settlements. Lacking the urban centres created under the Romans in the rest of Britain, the economy of Scotland in the early Middle Ages was overwhelmingly agricultural. With a lack of significant transport links and wider markets, most farms had to produce a self-sufficient diet of meat, dairy products and cereals, supplemented by hunter-gathering. Limited archaeological evidence indicates that throughout Northern Britain, farming was done on single homesteads or amongst a small cluster of three or four homes. Each of these probably contained a nuclear family, with kinship relationships likely to be common among neighbouring houses and settlements, reflecting the partition of land through inheritance.A. Woolf, From Pictland to Alba: 789 – 1070 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), , pp. 17–20. A system was adopted that distinguished between the infield, around the settlement, where crops were grown every year, and the outfield, further away, where crops were grown and then left fallow in different years. This would be the predominant system until the eighteenth century.H. P. R. Finberg, The Formation of England 550–1042 (London: Paladin, 1974), , p. 204.
The nature of agricultural production was determined by the land and climate. The cold and wet climate meant that more oats and barley were grown than corn. The evidence of bones indicates that cattle were by far the most important domesticated animal, followed by pigs, sheep and goats, while domesticated fowl were very rare.K. J. Edwards and I. Ralston, Scotland after the Ice Age: Environment, Archaeology and History, 8000 BC – AD 1000 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), , p. 230. Bone evidence indicates that there was a significant growth in the fish trade around 1000.J. H. Barrett, A. M. Locker and C. M. Robert, "'Dark Age Economic' revisited: the English fish-bone evidence 600–1600" in L. Sicking, D. Abreu-Ferreira, eds, Beyond the Catch: Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900–1850 (Brill, 2009), , p. 33. This increased marine exploitation of the Highlands and Islands may have been as a result of the arrival of Scandinavian settlers in this period.L. Sicking and D. Abreu-Ferreirain "Introduction" in L. Sicking, D. Abreu-Ferreira, eds, Beyond the Catch: Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900–1850 (Brill, 2009), , p. 12.
The early Middle Ages were a period of climatic deterioration, with a drop in temperature and an increase in rainfall, resulting in more land becoming unproductive.. Climate change had a major impact on agriculture in this period and terms emerged to describe different quantities of land. In the period c. 1150 to 1300, warm dry summers and less severe winters allowed cultivation at much greater heights above sea level and made land more productive. Arable farming grew significantly, but was still more common in low-lying areas than in high-lying areas such as the Highlands, Galloway and the Southern Uplands.G. W. S. Barrow, Kingship and Unity: Scotland 1000–1306 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), , p. 12. The main unit of land measurement in Scotland was the ploughgate, also known as the davoch and in Lennox as the arachor.G. W. S. Barrow, Kingship and Unity: Scotland 1000–1306 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), , pp. 12–15. It may have measured about ,G. W. S. Barrow, Kingship and Unity: Scotland 1000–1306 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), , p. 15. divided into 4 raths.C. J. Neville, Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earldoms of Strathearn and Lennox, c. 1140–1365 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), , 2005), p. 96. The average amount of land used by a husbandman in Scotland might have been around 26 acres.G. W. S. Barrow, Kingship and Unity: Scotland 1000–1306 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), , p. 18.
Most farming was based on the lowland fermtoun or Highland baile, settlements of a handful of families that jointly farmed an area notionally suitable for two or three plough teams, allocated in run rigs to tenant farmers. They usually ran downhill so that they included both wet and dry land, helping to offset some of the problems of extreme weather conditions. Most ploughing was done with a heavy wooden plough with an iron coulter, pulled by oxen, which were more effective in heavy soils and cheaper to feed than horses. Obligations to the local lord usually included supplying oxen for ploughing the lord's land on an annual basis and the much resented obligation to grind corn at the lord's mill.J. Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), , pp. 41–55.
In the late Middle Ages, average temperatures began to reduce again, with cooler and wetter conditions limiting the extent of arable agriculture, particularly in the Highlands.J. Steane, The Archaeology of Medieval England and Wales (London: Taylor & Francis, 1985), , p. 174. The introduction of new monastic orders such as the Cistercians in this period also brought innovations in agriculture. Their monasteries became major landholders, particularly in the Borders. They were sheep farmers and producers of wool for the markets in Flanders. By the late Middle Ages, Melrose Abbey and the Earl of Douglas had about 15,000 sheep apiece, making them among the largest sheep farmers in Europe.K. Jillings, Scotland's Black Death: The Foul Death of the English (Stroud: Tempus, 2006), , pp. 69–73.