The emblem of the Highland Land Law Reform Association
The first Highland Land League (Scottish Gaelic: Dionnasg an Fhearainn)[1] emerged as a distinct political force in Scotland during the 1880s, with its power base in the country's Highlands and Islands. It was known also as the Highland Land Law Reform Association and the Crofters' Party. It was consciously modelled on the Irish Land League.
By the 1880s the common people or peasantry of the Highlands and Islands had been cleared from large areas of their ancestral lands, the clearances (known as the Highland Clearances) having occurred during the decades following the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Some emigrated at that time, but most were forced, to Canada, the US, as well as Australia and other British colonies. Many who did not leave were crammed into crofting (pieces of land surrounded by legislation) townships on very small areas of land where they were openly abused and exploited by their landlords. Many lacked even crofts of their own and became cottars and squatters on the crofts of other people. Landlords turned most of the land over to use as sheep farms and hunting parks called deer forests. In addition, in the 1880s, the Highlands and Islands were recently ravaged by the potato famine of the mid 19th century. The 1880s were also a time, however, of growing democracy and of government which was increasingly responsive to public opinion, particularly after the electoral reform Act of 1884. As many crofters in the Scottish Highlands newly qualified as £10 occupiers, the Act empowered Scottish Gaels to form the Crofters' Party and Highland Land League.[2]
In the early 1880s, in terms of gaining sympathetic public opinion, crofters were protesting very effectively, with rent strikes and land raids, about their lack of secure tenure of land and their severely reduced access to land. The government responded in 1883 with a commission of enquiry headed by Francis Napier, and the Napier Commission published recommendations in 1884. Napier's report fell a long way short of addressing crofters' demands and it stimulated a new wave of protests.
The Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886 (49 & 50 Vict. c. 29) applied to croft tenure in an area which is now recognisable as a definition of the Highlands and Islands: that of the ancient counties of Argyll, Inverness-shire, Ross and Cromarty, Sutherland, Caithness, Orkney and Shetland. (The name is used now as a name for an electoral area of the Scottish Parliament: please see Highlands and Islands). The Act granted security of tenure of existing crofts and established the first Crofters Commission (The same name was given to a different body in 1955).[3] The Crofters Commission had rent-fixing powers. Rents were generally reduced and 50% or more of outstanding arrears were cancelled. The Act failed however to address the issue of severely limited access to land, and crofters renewed their protest actions. At the same time there was a shift in the political climate: William Gladstone's Liberal government fell from power; the new Conservative government was much less sympathetic to the plight of crofters and much more willing to use troops to quell protests. The Liberal Party appeared to adopt and champion Land League objectives and, as a distinct parliamentary force, the Land League fragmented during the 1890s. On the issue of access to land, therefore, little real progress was to be made until after the First World War.
Some resources were put into development of the communications infrastructure of the Highlands and Islands (roads, railways, and harbours) and, in the early years of the 20th century the Congested Districts Board was able to push through the establishment of new crofting townships on Skye and in the Strathnaver area of Sutherland. The Congested Districts Board was created in 1897 and can be seen as a precursor to the Highlands and Islands Development Board, which is known now as Highland and Islands Enterprise (HIE).
Meanwhile, in Glasgow, in 1909, a second Highland Land League was formed as a political party. This organisation was a broadly left-wing group that sought the restoration of deer forests to public ownership, abolition of plural farms and the nationalisation of the land. Also they resolved to resolutely defend crofters facing eviction by their landlords and they supported home rule for Scotland.
During the First World War (1914 to 1918) politicians made lavish promises about reform which would follow the war, and of course many crofters died in the war itself. After the war the words of politicians did not translate into immediate action, but crofters returning from the war were in no mood to accept government inaction. Land raids began again. To set this Scottish Highland political radicalism in context, the 1916 Easter Rising was recent history in Ireland, as were the LiberalFebruary Revolution and the CommunistOctober Revolution in Russia, not to mention the socialist Kiel mutiny, which helped end the First World War and bring about the German Revolution. With these other events in mind, the Highland Land League, although radical, were positively gentle in their politics compared to radicals in other countries around the same time.
In August 1918 the new Land League had affiliated with the Labour Party, with four candidates for the 1918 general election being joint League-Labour. By the 1920s they had fully merged with Labour, under the promise of autonomy for Scotland were Labour to gain power in the forthcoming years, which however remained unfulfilled, presumably at least partly because although Labour succeeded in forming a government, they failed to gain a majority in the House of Commons.
Subsequent history
Land League members were then key to the formation of the Scottish National Party in 1934. When faced with new land raids the government responded by giving the Board of Agriculture the money and powers to do something like what had been promised. The Board's work was assisted by a downturn in the profitability of sheep farming and, by the late 1920s, perhaps 50,000 acres (20,000 hectares; 200 square kilometres) of arable land and 750,000 acres (300,000ha; 3,000km2) of hill pasture had been given over to establishing new crofts. Most of the new crofts were in the Hebrides, the area where Gaelic best survives into the present day. Crofters benefited also in parts of Caithness, Sutherland, Shetland, and various other localities.
Ian Bradley, "'Having and Holding': The Highland Land War of the 1880s," History Today, Dec 1987, Vol. 37#12 pp 23–28
Ewen A. Cameron, "Communication or Separation? Reactions to Irish Land Agitation and Legislation in the Highlands of Scotland, c. 1870-1910," English Historical Review, June 2005, Vol. 120 Issue 487, pp 633–666, doi:10.1093/ehr/cei124
The Highlands is a historical region of Scotland. Culturally, the Highlands and the Lowlands diverged from the Late Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots language replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands. The term is also used for the area north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, although the exact boundaries are not clearly defined, particularly to the east. The Great Glen divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands. The Scottish Gaelic name of A' Ghàidhealtachd literally means "the place of the Gaels" and traditionally, from a Gaelic-speaking point of view, includes both the Western Isles and the Highlands.
The Agricultural Revolution in Scotland was a series of changes in agricultural practice that began in the 17th century and continued in the 19th century. They began with the improvement of Scottish Lowlands farmland and the beginning of a transformation of Scottish agriculture from one of the least modernised systems to what was to become the most modern and productive system in Europe. The traditional system of agriculture in Scotland generally used the runrig system of management, which had possibly originated in the Late Middle Ages. The basic pre-improvement farming unit was the baile and the fermetoun. In each, a small number of families worked open-field arable and shared grazing. Whilst run rig varied in its detail from place to place, the common defining detail was the sharing out by lot on a regular basis of individual parts ("rigs") of the arable land so that families had intermixed plots in different parts of the field.
The West Highland Free Press was founded in the Scottish Highlands in 1972 as a left-wing weekly newspaper, but with the principal objective of providing its immediate circulation area with the service which a local paper is expected to provide. It is based at Broadford on the Isle of Skye, covering Skye, Wester Ross and the Outer Hebrides.
Crofting is a form of land tenure and small-scale food production peculiar to the Scottish Highlands, the islands of Scotland, and formerly on the Isle of Man. Within the 19th-century townships, individual crofts were established on the better land, and a large area of poorer-quality hill ground was shared by all the crofters of the township for grazing of their livestock. In the 21st century, crofting is found predominantly in the rural Western and Northern Isles and in the coastal fringes of the western and northern Scottish mainland.
The Highlands and Islands is an area of Scotland broadly covering the Scottish Highlands, plus Orkney, Shetland, and the Outer Hebrides.
The Highland Potato Famine was a period of 19th-century Highland and Scottish history over which the agricultural communities of the Hebrides and the western Scottish Highlands saw their potato crop repeatedly devastated by potato blight. It was part of the wider food crisis facing Northern Europe caused by potato blight during the mid-1840s, whose most famous manifestation is the Great Irish Famine, but compared with its Irish counterpart, it was much less extensive and took many fewer lives as prompt and major charitable efforts by the rest of the United Kingdom ensured relatively little starvation.
The Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that created legal definitions of crofting parish and crofter, granted security of land tenure to crofters and produced the first Crofters Commission, a land court which ruled on disputes between landlords and crofters. The same court ruled on whether parishes were or were not crofting parishes. In many respects the Act was modelled on the Irish Land Acts of 1870 and 1881. By granting the crofters security of tenure, the Act put an end to the Highland Clearances.
The Napier Commission, officially the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Condition of Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands was a royal commission and public inquiry into the condition of crofters and cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.
A croft is a traditional Scottish term for a fenced or enclosed area of land, usually small and arable, and usually, but not always, with a crofter's dwelling thereon. A crofter is one who has tenure and use of the land, typically as a tenant farmer, especially in rural areas.
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Assynt is a sparsely populated area in the south-west of Sutherland, lying north of Ullapool on the west coast of Scotland. Assynt is known for its landscape and its remarkable mountains, which have led to the area, along with neighbouring Coigach, being designated as the Assynt-Coigach National Scenic Area, one of 40 such areas in Scotland.
The Crofters' Party was the parliamentary arm of the Highland Land League. It gained five MPs in the 1885 general election and five in the election of the following year.
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The Highland Clearances were the evictions of a significant number of tenants in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, mostly in two phases from 1750 to 1860.
Glendale is a community-owned estate on the north-western coastline of the Duirinish peninsula on the island of Skye and is in the Scottish council area of Highland. The estate encompasses the small crofting townships of Skinidin, Colbost, Fasach, Glasphein, Holmisdale, Lephin, Hamaraverin, Borrodale, Milovaig, Waterstein, Feriniquarrie, Totaig, Hamara, and others.
Charles Fraser-Mackintosh was a Scottish lawyer, land developer, author, and independent Liberal and Crofters Party politician. He was a significant champion of the Scottish Gaelic language in Victorian Britain.
John Murdoch was a Scottish newspaper owner and editor and land reform campaigner who played a significant part in the campaign for crofters rights in the late 19th century.
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