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Geographical and geological setting The history of urbanisation in Scotland is predetermined by the geography and geology of northern Britain. Often assumed to be a country of sharp divide between Highland and Lowland, its physical nature, however, is more complex. It was not merely the mountainous areas of the Highlands that were seemingly unapproachable from the more gentle Lowland terrain; but the south-west regions of Galloway and Ayrshire were equally divorced from the east coast; and the southern border region of the country, in its very lack of natural, physical definition, often had a somewhat different agenda from the other parts of Scotland. Even a cursory glance at the west coast of northern Britain, from Lancashire to the northern Highlands of Scotland, reveals the linkages that were to dominate this seaboard. Travel by water was to form the easiest method of contact for the western Highlands, Islands, Galloway and Ayrshire; and the predominant communication points and influences for these areas were to be not the Lowland basin centred around the River Forth, but Ireland and the North of England. The east coast, by contrast, used the sea to look to mainland Europe, and in particular northern France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia and the Baltic. They were more approachable, in terms of both ease and time of travelling, than the less accessible parts of Scotland. Rivers, such as the Tweed, the Forth, the Tay and the Dee, all providing natural harbours, would become the foci for this contact. Perth and Stirling, at the highest navigable points of the Rivers Tay and Forth respectively, were to play crucial roles in Scotland's history; and Berwick, Dundee and Aberdeen, with their good harbourage, were to dominate the economic scene; but increasingly under the hegemony of Edinburgh through its pre-eminent port of Leith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Scotland, as in England, ports were the kingdom's gateway to Christendom. Few of medieval Scotland's towns were, however, natural ports. Of fifty-five established burghs by 1300, twenty-three were located on inland sites. Although eleven others were on navigable rivers, most of these arguably owed their origins less to maritime access than to land routes which converged on estuarine fording points. Of the twenty-one coastal burghs many, such as Cromarty and Cullen, were of such minimal economic significance that they can be scarcely classified as either ports or towns. Even among those which did develop a regular maritime trade, the topography of some suggests that maritime access was of secondary significance to their early development. Although, for instance, noted in the early twelfth century as one of only three trading centres north of Forth, it remains uncertain whether Inverkeithing developed around the natural harbour at the mouth of the Keithing burn or around the main thoroughfare which was located on considerably higher ground to the north. A similar observation has been made of Crail and could be made of Montrose, where the distinctive place name of the harbour, Strumnay, suggests a separate origin from that of the adjacent town. There were few exceptions to the predominantly landward vista of the early Scottish burghs. Aberdeen was probably one, particularly if the plausible identification of its early nucleus as adjacent to the Denburn harbour is accepted. Dundee and Ayr were probably others. These coastal towns were well positioned to exploit the commercial expansion of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, an expansion spawned chiefly by a new Anglo-Norman elite demanding the importation of wine and wheat and the more or less simultaneous emergence of large quantities of wool available for export to the Netherlandish draperies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scotland before 1750 was a small and rather poor country whose significance for European political, economic and, to a lesser extent, intellectual life was at best peripheral. Her economy and society were transformed in the century after 1750 by agrarian and industrial changes which catapulted Scotland to prominence in world affairs, a standing that the early modern period had barely presaged. Until the advent of a largely urbanised and industrialised society in the nineteenth century, historians have tended to assume that the social structure of Scotland retained archaic forms which had long disappeared from more ‘developed’ countries such as England. Scotland's economy and level of wealth in the pre-industrial period have often seemed closest to those of Scandinavian countries or Ireland. Not only was Scotland peripheral to mainstream European history, but her society was so distinctive as to be of little relevance to an understanding of social organisation and change in a wider context. This introductory chapter sets out to question these preconceptions by analysing Scottish society between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution in a European context and, by presenting a brief and accessible outline of social structures and trends, to assess the typicality or distinctiveness of Scotland. In this task, the social historian is constrained by the comparative lack of academic research on pre-nineteenth-century Scottish society. Some aspects of Scottish social history have always been attractive to the Scots themselves, but the society of Scotland in the past has received remarkably little attention from scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION More than half the population of early modern Scotland was female. Nevertheless, the status of women in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century society remains obscure. Often omitted entirely from accounts of the period, women are commonly treated as peripheral and unimportant. Even recent research offers only brief asides about their place in social and economic life. Attempts to render women more visible have concentrated on prominent but atypical members of the upper classes or have simply described women's subordination. This chapter examines the economic, legal, political and cultural status of women in Scottish society between c.1500 and c.1800, concentrating on the middling and lower ranks. The analysis rests on three premises. First, we must understand the common experiences of men and women, more clearly to appreciate those which are distinctive to one gender. This essay seeks to add women to Scottish history, to look at their experience in a predominantly masculine rendering of historical discourse. Despite the presence of certain shared understandings, there is no uniform ‘women's experience’ except at the most reductionist level. Second, the neglect of women in historiography is partly attributable to the lack of documentation on their lives. Women's experiences are subsumed in those of men. Most analyses try, perhaps inevitably, to fit women into the categories and value systems of a society defined by men. The areas in which women functioned and their status appear principally to have been determined by men. Some of the problems of lack of evidence are insuperable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION The 150 years after 1500 saw the reshaping of urban society in Scotland. There was in the last quarter of the sixteenth century a significant recovery in the level of exports after a slump which had lasted since the early fourteenth century. A series of political crises, beginning with the Reformation, brought the burghs to an unaccustomed position at the front of the political stage. That, in turn, encouraged unprecedented interference in burgh affairs by central government and a much more co-ordinated urban voice in national politics, with the emergence in the 1550s of the Convention of Royal Burghs as the regular assembly for the commissioners of the chartered towns. Those towns and their townspeople had, in common with the rest of Scottish society, experienced modest demands for revenue from Scotland's medieval kings. From the 1530s onwards they were confronted by spiralling tax bills, which brought into the tax net sectors of the urban population previously exempt; one of the most striking differences between urban society in 1500 and 1650 was the dramatic increase in its taxpaying sector. There was in the same period (as in much of northern Europe), a significant if usually unquantifiable rise in the population of towns. There was probably no increase in the proportion of the Scottish people living in towns. But this growth was important for its impact on urban society, as it was the first significant rise in population for fully three centuries. It is difficult to believe that the combined effect of these novel pressures, which were mostly concentrated in the second half of the sixteenth century, left the social fabric of the medieval burgh community undisturbed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]