Most of what we know about agriculture in early modern Scotland comes from written sources concerned directly to record its business aspects. Estate papers record landlords’ dealings with their tenants. Testaments record farmers’ possessions. Baron court minutes record the adjudication of disputes and the making of agricultural rules. All these records had to be written in order to keep track of people's property and to enforce property rights. Although they were written for the benefit of those with substantial landed property, they also give us glimpses of the farm work of the propertyless. Such sources have enabled historians – including those contributing to this book – to answer many questions about early modern agriculture.

But are there other questions that we can ask – questions that these businesslike records cannot answer? Here I have in mind questions about the cultural meanings of agriculture for educated and literate Scots. What did agriculture mean to these people, who were almost never farmers themselves? Even the literate elite lived in daily proximity to tilled fields in which they saw crops growing, pastures in which they saw cattle and sheep grazing, and farming settlements in which they saw poultry scratching. The peasants who worked those fields, herded those animals and inhabited those settlements were often their own tenants, some of whom they may have known personally. Everyday diets, even of members of the elite, contained many meat, dairy and grain products derived from those same fields, processed locally in recognisable ways by those same peasants. The elite also craved exotic luxuries, but these were paid for, as they well knew, by their tenants’ rents. The seasonal round, even for the elite, was tangibly shaped by agriculture, with spring ploughing and autumn harvesting as intense periods in which landlords’ attention would be drawn to their estates. Culturally speaking, how did members of the elite experience all this? What did agriculture mean to them?

This chapter will range beyond the familiar sources for agricultural history. It will examine, not what people had to write about agriculture, but what they chose to write about it when they didn't have to. One point should be stressed at the outset: the harvest of such voluntary writing is far from bountiful. The sources discussed in this chapter are all informative in some way, but also informative is the enormous silence maintained about agriculture by most literate Scots in this period.

The Chronicle of Fortingall can be read as the diary of a sixteenthcentury Scottish peasant. It was written by the unbeneficed parish priest of Fortingall, in Highland Perthshire. He carried out his own farming, almost certainly for subsistence, and wrote about his experience of farming in his chronicle. It is extremely rare in this period to encounter words written by someone whose hands have held not only a pen but also farming tools. These words deserve close attention.

The chronicle is not primarily a personal diary; it is a semi-public and largely anonymous document, unlike (for instance) the personal account-book kept by the fifteenth-century Tuscan peasant Benedetto del Massarizia. The focus is on the community and its relationship with God, rather than the author as an individual; the chronicler does not even name himself. Most of his text is local obituaries and other such events. However, there are twenty-eight entries about the weather and farming, dated between 1554 and 1577, totalling something over a thousand words. Here the chronicler adopts a perspective of direct observation and firstperson commentary, pushing at the traditional boundaries of the genre.

The chronicle's discourse moves between what we might regard as meteorological data (actual weather), economic data (prices, meagre harvests, or deaths of livestock), moral commentary (sufferings of poor men, or landlords’ extortion) and providential commentary (God's grace, for instance in keeping prices low). As a priest, the chronicler probably saw his comments on weather and farming as a meditation on the relationship between the temporal and the eternal. His sympathies were with ‘poor men’ like himself (p. 141).

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The settlement of Fortingall, with the tract of farming land around it, was in the lower valley of the River Lyon, about 130m above sea level. Around it the land rose rapidly to over 400m in almost every direction, and in some places higher still. These heights were well beyond the reach of arable farming. In the comparable settlement of Lix, above Loch Tay, not far from Fortingall, the head dyke was usually at 750 feet (230m), with shielings above it at much higher altitudes. The head dyke marked the upper limit of arable land, and served to manage grazing animals by keeping them off the crops during the growing season. However, as we shall see, not all of the land below the head dyke was used for crops.

This book takes a fresh look at the rural economy of early modern Scotland. The primary focus is on the long period that preceded the rapid changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It shows that this period, before the main era of agricultural ‘improvement’, was nevertheless far from static.

It is timely that this topic is being revisited now. Several classic studies of Scottish agriculture were published between the late 1970s and early 1990s, but, as we shall see, this productive period was followed by a gap in which scholarship moved into other areas. This book returns to the topic of agriculture with awareness of more recent scholarship.

Approaches to agriculture often begin with everyday farming practices. The book has much on this, and one chapter even looks at a farmer's own writing. By contrast, landlords and estate management are prominent in several chapters. Some of these chapters show landlords as innovators, while one chapter highlights small tenants’ labour-intensive contributions to ‘improvement’. Not all the chapters bring good news; there is a chapter on Scotland's most disastrous famine, that of 1622–23.

The book is about more than farming practices, though. Social, administrative and economic contexts of agriculture all receive attention. And the book opens with a cultural chapter, surveying the cultural context within which agriculture was ‘imagined’. Some topics are best investigated at local level, and five chapters carry out detailed local studies. An ambitious conceptual chapter on models of capitalism in the ‘mercantilist age’ treats Scotland itself as a local study of a much broader phenomenon. The book concludes with a historiographical overview, contextualising the history of agriculture within the work done on other aspects of Scottish history since the 1990s.

More will be said later about the chapters that follow in the present book, but at this point we turn to a review of the state of research on the history of Scottish agriculture. This review falls into three sections. First there is a section on the early modern period. This is often concerned with eighteenth-century ‘Improvement’ and with the relationship of ‘Improvement’ to what came before it. How should agricultural change be periodised between about 1500 and 1850? Second there is a shorter section reviewing medieval studies, again focusing on questions of periodisation of agricultural change. A third section then reviews scholarship that has followed particular disciplinary and thematic perspectives.