The famine of the 1690s was the last national famine to occur in Scotland. It was the final time that the majority of the Scottish population faced the threat of starvation as a result of severe food shortage. In the nadir of the Little Ice Age, colder, wetter, unseasonable and erratic weather conditions wrought havoc on the underdeveloped Scottish agricultural sector. Beginning at a national level following the deficient harvest of 1695, the country experienced multiple harvest failures, high grain prices, a reduction in pastoral flocks and herds, increased mortality, economic difficulties and social dislocation. Widespread suffering was evident across...

In 1698 the privy council openly admitted that Scotland was in the grip of ‘not only a Scarcity, but a perfeit Famine, which is more sensible than ever was known in this Nation’.¹ By then, the country had suffered two consecutive national harvest failures, in 1695 and 1696, which sent mortality levels skyrocketing and forced the government to open the ports to foreign grain supplies. Over these years, the privy councillors witnessed an influx of hundreds of the country’s destitute into Edinburgh, fleeing the spectre of starvation and death in the countryside. Simultaneously, they obtained reports of ever-growing lists of...

In July 1695 the Scottish privy council passed the ‘Act for Encouraging the Export of Victual’, otherwise known as the ‘Corn Bounty Act’.¹ It aimed to increase the profitability of grain production for landowners by placing a 20-shilling bounty on each boll of grain exported, thus emulating the successful English act promoting grain export instituted at the Glorious Revolution. Bounty payments were to start in November after the harvest, when the new crop entered circulation. As William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England and proposer of the ill-fated Darien colony, described, the move proved to be exceedingly short-sighted: ‘In...

Starvation, or death resulting from severe malnourishment, was at a most basic level caused by one of two factors prohibiting the purchase of sufficient food for survival. Prices increased beyond the levels at which some individuals could afford to feed themselves, or because they lacked ‘the wherewithal to buy that food’.¹ Alternatively, people starved because there was no food, or insufficient quantities of food, available for purchase at any price.² Both were features of the Scottish grain market during the famine. Prices spiralled as supply diminished during this ‘abnormally severe short-term crisis’, reversing the trend of falling prices from the...

The dramatic rise in grain prices between 1695 and 1700 brought devastating consequences for the Scottish population. Throughout the country, despite regional variations of severity, it was a specific section of the population, the poor, which suffered most. In Scotland in the early modern period, as in parts of the third world today, ‘poverty was at least as important as food scarcity in causing famine’,¹ because ‘famine is strictly a social calamity’. The poor were the most economically vulnerable people in any Scottish community and those with the least resources to protect themselves from the price rises and food shortages...

In 1732, Patrick Walker recalled his memories of the famine which he ascribed as seven years of judgement sent by God to punish the sins of the Scots:

Through the long continuance of these manifold judgments, deaths and burials were so many and common that the living were wearied in the burying of the dead. I have see corpses drawn in sleds, many got neither coffin nor winding-sheet . . . I have seen some walking about the sun-setting, and to-morrow about six a-clock in the summer morning found dead in their houses, without making any stir at their death,...

The significant levels of population loss experienced in parishes across the north of the country was due to an increase in deaths through starvation and epidemic disease, and migration of those forced to leave their homes to find sustenance and charity in areas in which better economic circumstances were available, frequently from the hilly and mountainous regions to areas of better grain supply in the towns and villages of the Lowlands.¹ This could account for part of the quicker rate of population recovery experienced in the eastern Lowlands as people from uplands areas moved into the towns and villages of...

The famine was a demographic disaster for Scotland. The crisis surrounding the famine had far-reaching consequences for the Scottish population and economy both in the second half of the 1690s and in the following decades. Yet, even now it is regarded by historians of the late seventeenth century as only one, and not necessarily the most important, of four disasters to impact on Scotland in the 1690s. To what extent has the famine been overshadowed by the huge political and economic significance of the Union of the Parliaments, or the more famous Highland famine of the mid-nineteenth century, in terms...