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The problems of investigating the standard of living in Scotland at any point before the mid twentieth century are enormous, as they must be for any country before government begins to collect modern statistical data on income, prices and employment. These problems are of two kinds: conceptual, concerning the nature and meaning of a ‘standard of living’, and practical, concerning the accumulation of appropriate evidence. The first kind we shall for the moment side step, defining for our purposes the standard of living as what contributes to real income, whether in money or in kind: that is to say, we assume the standard to be rising if wages rise faster than prices and if employment opportunities for an individual or family remain the same or, better, improve. This admittedly dodges very real problems of having to weight benefits and costs, if higher incomes are accompanied (as no doubt they often were) by more laborious toil or a deteriorating environment for life at home and work. The second problem is the evidential one. What sort of data are relevant to the exploration of the standard of living? They may be both qualitative and quantitative, but those on which Scottish historians have chiefly relied for their judgements before 1800 have hitherto mainly been qualitative – i.e., the broad opinions of contemporaries concerning what was happening in the world about them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the early modern period was marked by increasing legislative concern with the standardisation of weights and measures, this was a process which made only gradual headway prior to the nineteenth century. With a plethora of local weights and measures standing alongside the still evolving national standards, identifying which particular system of weight or measurement was in use in various contexts has posed one of the most intractable evidential problems we have had to face. Zupko's paper on weights and measures in Scotland makes clear how complex the situation could be. In Forfarshire, to take one example, butcher meat was sold by Scottish troy weight, but butter and cheese according to a tron pound which varied in size across the county from 22 oz. avoirdupois in Dundee, Arbroath and Cupar to 27 oz. avoirdupois in Kirriemuir. In spite of Zupko's work and the invaluable evidence to be found in John Swinton's late eighteenth-century plea for standardisation, a full understanding of the regional use of customary systems remains elusive. Interpreting the price series in the foregoing tables is, to some extent confused rather than clarified by the process of standardisation that was underway. Thus whilst many of the longer price series, in particular the fiars, were probably initially set down in terms of local customary measures, in time the national standards came to be adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction to the sources Wages were highly complex in early modern society, in Scotland as elsewhere. They might be paid entirely in money or entirely in kind, or in a mixture of both. They might be paid differently to the same person for different kinds of work (money with food at harvest, money alone for other day labour). They might be paid at a higher rate in summer than in winter. They would certainly be paid higher to some categories of worker than to others. The jobs might be described by age and sex as well as by skill and task (‘herd lass’, ‘journeyman wright’), but what was understood by certain critical terms (‘master mason’, ‘agricultural servant’) might vary nevertheless from one period to another or from one locality to another. Any attempt at the objective measurement of change through time is clearly going to be fraught with difficulties. In our investigation we have used four kinds of evidence; wages from accounts extracted from the account books and papers of employers (tables 8.1–8.7); assessed wages, statements of maximum wage rates set down by town councils and justices of the peace (tables 8.8–8.10); estimated wages as reported retrospectively by the ministers and others in the Statistical account of the 1790s (tables 8.11–8.16), and poll-tax wages (tables 8.17–8.18) as declared to the authorities who levied a percentage tax on wages in the 1690s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What was the food of the Scottish population in the period between the end of the sixteenth century and the end of the eighteenth – what were the main ingredients, how satisfactory was it in terms of quantity and nutritional content, how did it change? Most explorations of Scottish economic and social history, though willing to mention famines, have steered well clear of any detailed examination of diet. In a study of prices and wages which has as one of its central purposes the exploration of the standard of living, and which concerns a society in which the wage itself was frequently paid partly or entirely in kind, food history must nevertheless be a central theme. Late eighteenth-century budgets suggest that among the labouring population at least two-thirds of family income was devoted to food, (see chapter 9 below). The proportion must have been the same, or greater, earlier. Food, therefore, was what the standard of living was largely about. In this chapter we have deliberately eschewed discussing the problem of famine and dearth, partly because it has been considered elsewhere, but also because it was very much the exceptional and not the ordinary lot of the population. Even in the seventeenth century fewer than ten years can be identified as ones of widespread grain shortage, and even these were not universal across Scotland; in the eighteenth century the number is about five. We are here concerned about ordinary people in ordinary times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meat and livestock prices: introduction (tables 6.1–6.16) The tables in this chapter bring together evidence on Scottish meat and livestock prices, together with prices of tallow, candle, butter and eggs from the sixteenth century to around 1780. Price quotations are very sparse before the middle of the sixteenth century, but even thereafter few good series are available. The suite of tables, considered as a whole, provide a fair indication of long-term price trends; for short-term movements, the St Andrews University meat purchase accounts, (tables 6.1–6.3), the various eighteenth-century price series (tables 6.12–6.16) and, of course, the Leven and Melville monthly price series 1690–1702 (table 6.11) are the most useful, though as usual all need to be used with caution. The tallow price series (tables 6.17–6.19) may also be useful in tracing short-term movements in sheep prices, but these have their own particularly complex interpretative problems, discussed in the next section. The question of typicality is particularly difficult with regard to livestock prices. Precisely when in the year any given quotation refers is often unknown, yet, as the Leven and Melville series demonstrates, prices varied significantly according to the season. Moreover, it is seldom stated exactly how old, and never how big, any of the cattle or sheep referred to in the miscellaneous series may have been when bought or sold. Even apparently straightforward terms contain ambiguities. The term ‘cattle’ or ‘nolt’ includes both oxen and cows (‘kye’). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-term trends to ca.1650 In the three preceding chapters we have laid out and explained a series of price tables for grains and grain-based foods, drawn from burghal records, from fiars and from monthly press reports. The purpose of this chapter is to attempt a broad description and interpretation of both long-term and short-term trends, to give our figures a context. First, however, it is worth explaining again that throughout the foregoing tables and in the course of this chapter, our use of dates refers to ‘crop years’. Thus when we state, for example, that ‘1622 was a dear year’, what we are saying is that prices were high following the crop of 1622, which begins to be cut in the early autumn of 1622 and is the basis of burgh assessments set around November 1622 and of the fiars struck in or around February 1623. In either case the price structure determined by that harvest ruled until supply conditions were altered by expectations concerning the following harvest in the late summer or autumn of 1623. This needs to be borne in mind by, for example, demographic historians trying to correlate prices with mortality in the spring of the calendar year 1623 or social historians interested in vagrancy in the summer of the same calendar year. In each case the relevant price statistic is headed in our tables 1622, not 1623. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice, common throughout much of the seventeenth century and the whole of the eighteenth, whereby sheriffs held annual courts to determine the prevailing price of the commonest sorts of grain in their counties, has long been appreciated by scholars attempting to chart the movement of prices in early modern Scotland. Termed ‘fiars’, many of these price series survive, and some provide an almost unbroken record of grain prices from the mid seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The fiars were not finally abolished until the Local Government (Scotland) Act of 1973. However, although apparently providing what is beyond doubt the most comprehensive and uniform source on Scottish grain prices available (tables 3.1–3.19), they also pose interpretative difficulties. A detailed appraisal of their purpose, method of calculation and value as a guide to actual market prices is clearly necessary. The derivation and meaning of the word ‘fiars’ and the origin of the practice of ‘striking’ such prices are both obscure. The word itself seems to mean ‘market price’. Identical in meaning to Middle English ‘feor’ and Old French ‘feur’, it is derived from the Latin ‘forum’ in the sense of a market, and hence market price. However, it is clear that sheriffs did not hold courts to strike the county fiars prices just as an academic exercise. In one sense, they were, in the words of a not disinterested critic, ‘conventional prices struck for a particular purpose’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The burghs and market regulation The extensive records produced by the town councils constitute one of the richest sources available for the history of prices in early modern Scotland. They contain some of the longest price series available, in many cases pre-dating fiars prices by more than a century. Although posing considerable interpretative difficulties, they provide a detailed record of price trends and fluctuations in a period otherwise largely devoid of reliable price data. The grain and grain-product prices, along with wine prices, derived from the town councils form the tables attached to this chapter, which is intended as a guide to their interpretation. The majority of the prices to be found in burgh records refer to the products of the principal crafts. Wheatbread, ale, tallow and candle prices appear almost annually in some burgh records, but other commodities such as oatbread, ryebread, wine and various kinds of meat appear at least periodically. Even the price of whisky was occasionally set. The burghs also assessed the price of labour, as we shall see in chapter 8. It is, however, important to acknowledge at the outset that most of these prices do not purport to record current market prices, but rather the price at which such goods were to be sold in the future. The fact that these were ‘statute’ prices – statements regarding the price at which certain goods should be sold – raises immediate problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The grain price series so far considered all provide a relatively coarse description of price movements; the fiars courts and town councils generally only set prices on an annual basis. Whilst this is of little consequence with regard to the assessment of longer-term movements, short-term price fluctuations, notably those within the year, are effectively obscured. For an insight into these, however, it is possible to turn to the quite remarkable series of monthly market prices recorded in the Caledonian Mercury and Scots Magazine. These chart the price of wheat, oats, barley and pease in East Lothian markets from 1721, and the price of oatmeal, peasemeal and bearmeal in Edinburgh from 1741. Such is the quality of this evidence that it not only provides a rare opportunity to trace in detail short-term price fluctuations, but also to examine both the relationship between those prices and the annually struck fiars and also the character of the annual cycle of grain price fluctuation. There are, however, a number of interpretative difficulties associated with this data which must be addressed before turning to the actual price series. The bulk of this price data has been extracted from issues of the Scots Magazine. Prices of first, second and third wheat, oats, barley and pease begin to appear regularly in a small table headed simply ‘Haddington Prices’ from the March issue of 1741. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Scotland, the history of prices and wages has until very recently been very much neglected. For the middle ages and the period up to the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the main nineteenth-century work is R.W. Cochran-Patrick's great volumes, Records of the coinage of Scotland, which have provided ever since a mine of information on debasement. The record societies, and the Scottish Record Office itself, printed a series of sources from which price quotations can be culled, of which the most useful beyond doubt are the Exchequer rolls of Scotland. From these the twentieth-century historians of mediaeval Scotland, whose concerns like those of their predecessors have been almost exclusively political, have made a number of observations on price trends incidental to their main purpose. Recent, more detailed work on the Scottish currency has been undertaken for the middle ages by Stewart, Metcalf, Scott and others and for the price revolution of the sixteenth century by Challis. Nevertheless, the course of commodity prices and wages even in the very critical sixteenth century lacked systematic investigation: there is no volume on the economic or political history of Scotland in that period which contains as much as a single table or graph relative to price history, and scarcely any that contain more than a paragraph or two of generalised comment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]