William Forrester reads a lot: not only Bible and Bunyan these days but histories and treatises, philosophy and theology.
Tonight, by candle light, he is reading An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. He finds it thought-provoking.
The Professor contends that the greatest improvements in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment, with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.
Which does, William reflects, cohere to his own experience since taking over the lease of the Bield from his, now sadly deceased, father, Samuel. His grandfather, Walt, was a ploughman when he first arrived in Gargunnock, William’s father was his loon. But still they were paid in meal and the provision of a kailyard so, in addition to ploughing and the care of horses and the maintenance of gear, the pair of them knew how to dig and delve, nurture kail and cabbage, oats and bere, shear and thresh, lime and manure. And, since Walt was a widower, cook and clean too. And not just ‘know’! Be practiced in it!
For does the Bible not say, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.”[i]
Were all those times to be divided out between folk, some to plant and some to pluch, some to build and some to breakdown? Will birth and death be all we have in common?
In time, although William and his brothers served on the farm, Samuell hired a halflan-callant as cow-herd. There was a barnman and a thresher in the winter months. By the time his father died, they had three deemies: a scodgie , responsible for all the household chores, while the others spun a hesp of yarn each day, milked cows and, of course, worked the field, spreading muck and dressing limekilns.
Division of labour[iii]. But the matter of the seasons perplexes William. There is always the need for an orra-man: for the seasons shall not cease[iv].
William and Christian had been married 6 years when Samuell died. William, as the oldest surviving son, took on the lease at Bield of Leckie.
Samuell and Katy had prospered while they held the lease.
After the rebels were defeated at Culloden, the army built a better road between their garrisons at Stirling and Dumbarton to add to the old, but barely passable, track from Glasgow.
The old track is still only passable on horseback or on foot, goods carried in panniers or in creels, but carts and even coaches to trundle past the Bield on the new road. The traffic of cadgers and itinerant craftsmen is increased but the Forresters can travel and trade more easily in the marts at Stirling and Falkirk.
Which raises the matter of Professor Smith’s second proposition: that the extent of the division of labour must be limited by the extent of the market.[v]
Does the road the soldiers built to supress rebellion then enable his current prosperity or does it drive men’s fragmentation into miserable atoms of excellence.[vi]
For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?[vii]
Shortly after the rebellion, Samuell heard from his cousins in Kilsyth that the factor there[viii] had planted out acres of land under a new, imported crop: the potato. It wasn’t a grain. It was a root, like a tumshie, but it yields great returns, stores well and is nutritious. Samuell and William brought two panniers back across the Campsies to Gargunnock and tried their hand. The yield was impressive though the taste of the tubers was queer at first.
Meanwhile, Falkirk became the main tryst of the drovers. Reversing the flow of cattle from their grandfathers’ time, the Highlandmen herded great numbers of black cattle to the Lowlands. The drovers were paid in silver, so there was a great amount of coin in circulation around the time of the Trysts. And the Forresters, in turn, charged the drovers, for the potatoes, meal, ale and whisky to supply their journey back to their islands and glens, in silver.
Which was handy, for now the Moirs demanded rents in silver – not in meal or chickens: silver with no connection with a place or plot, silver that was ignorant of the quality of the soil or the patterns of the weather.
He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap.[ix]
In the course of two successive leases, his family extended their acreage at every opportunity, bigging up the buildings on the farm from the simple row of cotts of Grandfather Walter’s time.
Samuell and his sons, not just William but John, Robert, James and David, toiled to shift the yird-fast stones from two ploughgates of rich carse soil, slowly, cautiously shifting the pattern of rotation from oats, flax and bere to oats, bere and potatoes.
At the time his father passed away, the biggins at Bield were arranged in one row .
Their dwelling stood in the middle with the barns at one end and the cattle-sheds at the other. They were all low in the walls and thatched with straw interleaved with turfs.
The Widow Katy’s house[vi] was thirty feet long inside and fourteen wide but divided into but and ben.
The but was the kitchen and servants’ apartment where family and servants ate and where William’s sisters, Rebecca and Helen, slept with the deemies.
His parents slept in the box-bed in the ben. There was a bit more head-room there. His mother stored the meal-kist and bags of groats, her butter churn and cheeses, in the loft, lint and wool, yarn and webs. There was a space for Samuell’s bible and psalter, too, from which he read to all of the household, morning and night, for family worship.
For treasures gained by wickedness do not profit, but righteousness delivers from death[x].
The ben had one small window near the gable end. The floor, in later years, was laid in planks of deal: the but had aye been beaten earth. The walls were roughly plastered and the rafters bare.
William and his brothers slept in the byre with the beasts and the male farm servants until William hand-fasted Christian.
Though the parks were Samuell’s, and latterly William’s, demesne, the but was his mother’s domain. There she and the deemies baked bread, churned milk, washed clothes (and ironed them). When not engaged in these chores, all the women of the household were constantly spinning yarn.
And it seemed to William, then, for all the diversity of their busyness that the place excelled in productivity and amiability.
Unlike their grandfathers’ dwellings, the but had a great lum over the grate on its gable end. In front of that grate, family and farm servants sat in the evenings, close by the fire, having eaten the same fare at the trestle. Katy had her work cut out, night after night, keeping William, his brothers and the halflan from getting into mischief with the lassies.
His father built a barn with a threshing-floor on one side of the dwelling: on the otherside, he built a byre where men and cattle slept. Cattle and horses were tethered without either heck or manger. Straw was laid on the floor at their head. Corn, when, they got any, was carried into them in hand-troughs, the brothers standing by to see they ate their allotted quantity in peace. A corner of the byre was kept for the chickens: the chookies thrived in the warmth of the kye nearby.
Behind the barn there was the corn-yard. Behind the dwelling-house, there was a kail-yard where his mother grew a few cabbages and a lot of kail. The midden – the mother of the meal-kist – was to the front of the steading. Each year the women cleared the dung and food waste, rotten straws, and any old thatch from the midden to manure the bere land.
Christian’s father’s people lived in the Port of Monteith, on the Southern boundary of the Highlands.
Her mother’s folk were Cossars, a family long-established in Musselburgh, in East Lothian. Christian still has relatives out there to the East, hard against the North Sea. She is plain and hard-working.
After the wedding, she and William moved in, together (and out of the byre): they lived in one of the Bield’s cotts. In contrast to his father’s house, their cott was built of stones and divots in alternate layers. Timber uprights supported the rigging tree and, on this structure, a thatch of straw and turf kept out the rain – more or less. The single room was twelve-feet square, warmed only by small grate. They had married late but, alone in the nights, at least at first, they rummelt on their straw pallet, doing their pious duty, regular as the Sabbath. Christian had four bairns by the time William took over the farm.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them![xi]
As Samuell aged, it is true, there was some tension between father and son. William thought of going elsewhere to find a lease of his own. But his family and his place was at Bield: three generations of hard darg and persistent husbandry. His surviving brothers, recognising their time, moved on to find places for themselves in the world. Becky married.
William was 41, with four bairns, before he had a lease of his own. His father should have passed on the tenancy sooner. Rested a bit before he passed on to his Maker. In the years since William took over he has renewed their lease, added another ploughgate to the farm, rebuilt, reorganised, improved: cast down the buildings his father worked to create.
Now, the biggins at Bield stand on three sides of a square: William’s dwelling-house and milk house are in the middle. The house is two storeys high, all of good masonry and covered with slate. The barns and byres stand on either side, a low wall closing of the yard. Pigs and poultry forage in the midden. Recently, they have added a potato shed to store the new crop.
Each apartment has its own window and fire-place. The walls are neatly plastered; so are the ceilings. In their own apartment, William and Christian have an easy-chair and a good oak elbow-chair where William sits to read his Bible and his many other books.: there is a clothes-boy, a chest of drawers for Christian’s napery and a writing-desk: a looking glass. They own a clock!
By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches[xii].
Or, as the Professor says, “It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.[xiii]” Though maybe not the chiels in the chaumer.
These days the Bield, its bigger barns and byres, requires more capital to stock but grows more corn and earns more silver. Moir admires the effort William has invested in his parks and the biggins in his tenure: but their 14 years is coming to an end. Next year they must bid to keep all they have built. And William knows their rent will rise.
Notes
[i] Ecclesiastes 3:1-22
[ii] Genesis 8:22
[iii] The division of labour, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour. The separation of different trades and employments from one another, seems to have taken place in consequence of this advantage. This separation, too, is generally carried furthest in those countries which enjoy the highest degree of industry and improve[iii]ment; what is the work of one man, in a rude state of society, being generally that of several in an improved one. In every improved society, the farmer is generally nothing but a farmer; the manufacturer, nothing but a manufacturer. Smith
[iv] The nature of agriculture, indeed, does not admit of so many subdivisions of labour, nor of so complete a separation of one business from another, as manufactures. It is impossible to separate so entirely the business of the grazier from that of the corn-farmer, as the trade of the carpenter is commonly separated from that of the smith. The spinner is almost always a distinct person from the, weaver; but the ploughman, the harrower, the sower of the seed, and the reaper of the corn, are often the same.
The occasions for those different sorts of labour returning with the different seasons of the year, it is mpossible that one man should be constantly employed in any one of them. This impossibility of making so complete and entire a separation of all the different branches of labour employed in agriculture, is perhaps the reason why the improvement of the productive powers of labour, in this art, does not always keep pace with their improvement in manufactures. Smith ibid.
[v] As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited by the extent of that power, or, in other words, by the extent of the market. When the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment, for want of the power to exchange all that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men’s labour as he has occasion for. Smith ibid.
[vi] But, in consequence of the division of labour, the whole of every man’s attention comes naturally to be directed towards some one very simple object.
[vii] Mark 8:6
[viii] Robert Graham
[ix] Ecclesiates 11:4.
[x] She had ‘The Widow Paterson’ as an epithet since 1745, despite her husband living with her.
[xii] Proverbs 10:2
[xiii] Proverbs 24:3-4
[xiv] Smith ibid
[xv] Psalms 127:3-5