Names follow properties, debts and obligations. The more formally propertied and, conventionally, prosperous a family, the sooner it features in the historical record and in greater detail.
The stories of my native Scots threads back to Dunfermline on the cusp of the Scottish Reformation, to a burgess and member of the town’s Merchant Guild during the turbulence of plague,the transition from Catholicism to Calvinist Protestantism and the contest for French and English hegemony over the Scottish state.
Situated across the Forth from the Capital and in the proximity of the Royal Palace in Dunfermline, the town was prosperous and well connected with Europe. James Burnes, my direct ancestor, was well-connected and, as a merchant, would be well-versed in the issues and challenges of his time.
From Dunfermline, the threads unravel along matrilineal lines through maltsters and tenant farmers, entrepreneurs and grocers as Scotland is convulsed with almost 150 years of civil war and invasion, repression and upheaval as Presbytarians and Episcopalians wrestled for doctrinal dominance and Whigs and Tories struggled for hegemony. Their battles, massacres and associated privation was visited on the rich lowlands along the edge of the Highland lines and along traditional routes from North to South.
The eventual settlement and stability that emerged from these conflicts brought a money-economy, enclosure and agricultural improvement, the Scottish Enlightenment and Industrialisation, processes which were categorised by a progressive disenfranchisement and immiseration of my Scots ancestors over time.
The opportunities of the Atlantic Trade and the resulting industrialisation of Inverclyde provided the context for an Alloa shipwright, Thomas Niccoll, to migrate to Greenock on Inverclyde and set up a successful boat building and property development enterprise.
Whilst my Niccoll lineage is rooted in the burghs and farming communities of the East, two other strands of Native Scots emerged. The Kiddies, coal and iron miners from Lanarkshire and the Esdons from the area around Paisley.
The Kiddies were miners. The family probably migrated west from Fife or Angus when the ‘serfdom’ of miners ended late in the 18th century.
Miners were enserfed to coal-masters until the very end of the 18th Century in Scotland. The laws and practices in place tied miners and their children to a single coal-master for life in a pattern not unlike chattel slavery. The particular challenges of mining, its skills, effort and rewards led to miners marrying within the trade so that they became a outcast and often feared group.
The Cambuslang area had a long history of coal mining, initially exploiting ‘daylight’ drift mines, following seams exposed on the banks of local burns. Due to a Scottish Act of parliament of 1644, miners[1] were essentially slaves to their coal-masters until 1798. Miners were not allowed to leave the employment of their coal-masters and their children were bound to the same master and mine. As a result, miners tended to inter-marry well into the 19th century and developed a distinctive and, generally, despised sub-culture within the structure of Scottish society.
After the repeal of the 1644 Act, the Keddie men stuck with the mining identity but, released from their serfdom to a specific coalmaster, they pursued new opportunities as coal and iron mines opened across the central belt to feed the demand of 19th century industry in the area.
As fossil fuel demands increased through the end of the 18th century and into the 19th, Lanarkshire mines were driven deeper in pursuit of new seams and pits or shafts became more prominent that the traditional daylight ‘ingoes’. Workers were lowered down the shaft in a basket, known as a kettle, and coals hauled back up from the shaft, initially by manpower or horse-gin. Latterly, for shallower mines, stair shafts were built allowing access and egress from the mine.
The New Statistical Account for Alloa (also a mining town at that time) describes the conditions and vicissitudes of mining families at that time. “ All the coals […] were brought from the wall face or foreheads of the mines by women, married or unmarried, old and young: there were known by the name of bearers. When the pit was deep they brought the coals to the pit bottom: but when the pit did not exceed 18 fathoms they carried the coals to the bank at the pit-head by a stair. A stout woman carried, in general, from 100 to 200 weight and, in a trial of strength 300 weight imperial.
Of all the slavery under heaven’s canopy ( the African slavery of the West Indies excepted) this was the most cruel and oppressive, both as regards the body and mind and, wherever this system exists, the condition of the collier and his family is most lamentable – it is a bar to any improvement or comfort whatever.”
“The price paid the collier for working the coal and filling the same at the coal face into the corve is, on average,1/- 8d per ton of 20 cwt and a good workman can earn £1 4/- per week[2].” Colliers were also provided with tied houses and free coal.[3]
Spinning and weaving of linen was a widespread cottage industry across all of Early Modern Scotland but innovations and improved trading opportunities in the 18th century encouraged specialisation in textiles especially in the areas around Paisley where plantation money, water power and the import of American cotton supported the industrialisation of thread spinning. Artisanal weavers, operating within a farming out system, processed the resulting threads to cloth and nurtured a distinctive culture in Paisley’s artisanal population, a culture that in turn nurtured political radicalism during the later decades of the 18th century and into the early 19th century, culminating in the Radical War of 1820.
By 1818, Paisley had 34,800 inhabitants, of whom between 6000 and 7000 were home-based handloom weavers, supported, in turn, by around 5000 drawboys. These ‘owner operators’ had underpinned the radicalism of Paisley in the earliest part of the 19th century. Their hours were long but the work was sociable. The quiet of manual looms allowed conversation and debate and piece-work afforded the weavers flexibility in their hours and work-life balance.[4]
The town, at this time, is represented as ‘Greysley’ in Alexander Smith’s story Of Fred Hagart’s Household:
` Greysley had no variety of occupation. It was to all intents and purposes a weaving town. – During the entire day, in the old-fashioned, crooked side-streets, the monotonous click of the loom and the sharp whir of the shuttle were continually heard. While trade was brisk, Greysley stuck to its work a lived well; when depressed-it stood in groups about the market-place and the corners of the streets, and in the evenings read and argued over the fiercest of political newspapers. Thirty years ago, trade was good; and in the spring and summer evenings the weaver, having comfortably dined, bird-nested- or botanised, and later still discussed European and local politics in cosy taverns, went to bed with- the idea that he was the most intelligent of human beings, and that Greysley generally was the axis on which the world revolved.
In the eastern extremity of the town was an old abbey […] Past the abbey, across the bridge, through the market-place and away westward, ran the principal street, till it disappeared in a sort of open suburb of houses of one story, across whose windowpanes festoons of birds’ eggs were hanging, and on whose window-sills flowers were blowing in summer, and where loom and shuttle were constantly heard.”
The introduction of the Jacquard Loom around 1820, however, destroyed the “individuality of character for which the class was noted”[5].
Paisley families such as the Elvings and Easdons emerged from this period of change and relative prosperity as craftsmen and would be citizens.
[1] And saltpan workers.
[2] About £140/week in 2022 value. Sinkers and miners earned 2 /- 6d per day and labourers 9/- to 12/- per week.
[3] The price of coal in 1835 was between 8/- and 10/- per ton.
[4] Paisley men were prominent among the radicals imprisoned and transported for their part in the Reform struggles of the 1820s.
[5] Hansard