An example of how history is necessary to
understand the conditions and help the researcher see if
there are clues to the ancestor’s existence can be
shown in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. History books of the area
indicate the use of tax rolls to study the pattern of landownership.
The first valued rent rolls were introduced in 1643. The
‘valued rent' was the real value of each property
as valued in 1656. Thus if a person was renting the land,
he should appear on these lists. When he disappears he has
either left the area or died. Thus clues of his leaving
the area would occur when someone else picks up the rent.
Rent at this time was paid mainly in grain
(ground oatmeal and bere). Tenants were also responsible
for a variety of produce for their landlord and his house
and had to do some labour such as plouging, harrowing, carting
manure, and harvesting on the Mains, using their own animals
and eequipment. They also cut and carried peat for the landowner,
and took their grain rents to market.
While Aberdeenshire tenants were legally
free men, their relationship with their landlord was a form
of feudalism. Men would work together in a cooperative of
four, six, eight or more share holders. Their lands were
intermingled in a system known as runrig which
resulted from the need to divide the land shares according
to the quality as well as the quantity of land. This produced
scattered blocks of land. The rent rolls would show cottars,
who sublet small portions of land. At least 70% of land
in Aberdeen was handled this way.
At the end of the 17th century it became
harder for the cottar class to move up economically, unless
he would inherit. When the cottars became deprived of their
small stakes in the land in the interests of greater farming
efficiency, towards the end of the 18th century, they evolved
into the “landless group of wage-earning ploughmen
and labourers.” When a high proportion of tenants
on many estates became close to the margins of subsistence,
it became a good reason for going to America. They often
could not afford to go on their own, but the landowners
might pay for them to go rather than to feed them for another
year.
