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3 - Scotland 1750–1850
- Edited by F. M. L. Thompson, University of London
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 07 June 1990, pp 155-280
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Summary
In spite of a continuing sense of national identity, Scotland in the eighteenth century was a country of marked regional and ethnic differences. The major division was between the English-speaking areas, all in what is called the Lowlands, and the area of Gaelic usage, the Highlands. The line dividing English from Gaelic speech had been narrowing down the Gaeltacht for centuries, and by the mid-eighteenth century lay very near to the great geological fault which makes the highland edge, though even so there were English-speaking areas to the north of the fault: most of the plain forming the southern coast of the Moray Firth, the town of Inverness, the triangle of Caithness lying beyond the county of Sutherland. The division was not simply one of speech, but of culture, social structure and the means of disseminating culture. There were, before the 1780s, practically no printed books in Gaelic: a translation of the psalms existed, but was not readily available, since it had never been properly distributed. The lack of an Old Testament in Gaelic meant that the imageries used in Scottish and in Gaelic literature were totally separate. Few even of educated men in the Highlands could express themselves in Gaelic on paper with accepted orthography. Gaelic culture was mostly conveyed in song, and usually by the physical presence of the singer. The poetic base of these songs might be the creation of either sex, though male assumptions have sometimes left the name of women poets unknown. The highland area was poor and economically backward, feeding itself marginally on its own grain and the erratic supply of milk and blood from its cattle. Difficulties in land transport perpetuated poverty.
2 - Scottish food and Scottish history, 1500–1800
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- By A. Gibson, T.C. Smout
- Edited by Robert Allen Houston, University of St Andrews, Scotland, Ian D. Whyte, Lancaster University
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- Book:
- Scottish Society, 1500–1800
- Published online:
- 08 March 2010
- Print publication:
- 02 February 1989, pp 59-84
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Summary
The purpose of this chapter is, firstly, to discuss a change in the nature of Scottish diet between the late Middle Ages and the mid-eighteenth century, a change which decreased the total consumption of animal-based foods per head and increased that of grain-based food. It is not our intention to present a detailed history of Scottish diet for the period in all its complexity nor to measure its nutritional adequacy: the latter task is one to which we shall return elsewhere. Nor is it our intention to compare fully Scottish dietary experience with that of other countries and regions: that interesting work must be left to a time when there is wider agreement on methodology in analysing diets, more research on change in the long term and, above all, a stronger revival of interest in early modern dietary history in Scandinavia and England on the part of economic historians.
The sources we have used for this part of the paper are as imperfect as time has left them. Before the seventeenth century they are almost entirely qualitative. For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they improve slightly, in so far as certain detailed diets have survived enabling a few quantitative analyses to be made of the food provided in selected institutions. We have disregarded, for these immediate purposes, the food set before the upper classes at court, on the top tables of noble households and at universities, since our focus is rather upon the experience of the commonality.