Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 2 (2011), p. 333

The poor harvests of the 1690s or so-called ‘ill years’ have never attracted the detailed historical analysis accorded to the Highland famine of the 1840s. Yet, as the author of this welcome new study, Karen Cullen, points out, the famine of the 1690s was a national famine as opposed to the regional famine of the 1840s, and the death toll in the 1690s was always seen as higher than that of the 1840s, with as much as 10 per cent of the Scottish population dying from its effects and as much as 20 per cent locally. Cullen’s monograph sets out to address this deficiency, providing an informed and insightful analysis of the ‘ill years’.

As a text, it comes across as having a number of clear strengths. First, it provides what is easily the most authoritative analysis of exactly what happened in the 1690s, establishing precisely how the ‘ill years’ unfolded in terms of harvests and food supply. Though sometimes labelled as the ‘seven ill years’, the crisis was spread over only five years, three of which produced nationally catastrophic harvests (1695, 1696, and 1698), though poorer weather conditions had started to affect harvests in the years immediately before 1695. Second, there is an impressive grasp of context throughout the book. As well as reviewing Scotland’s long-term record of poor harvests so as to add weight to the seriousness of what happened in the 1690s, Cullen also explores how what happened in Scotland compared to the subsistence crises happening elsewhere in Europe at this point. Consideration is also given to its economic context, the ‘ill years’ being only one of four economic crises affecting Scotland in the 1690s. Third, the extended discussion of how weather led to poor harvests and then to famine is not handled in a simple cause–effect way. Cullen holds to the Amartya Sen view that it is not poor harvests alone that matter but access to food or food entitlement. Through this approach, she opens up a much broader debate, one that considers how markets, the Privy Council, kirk sessions and local communities responded to the problems created by scarcity, each responding with different interests or sentiment and effectiveness. Significantly, she concluded that whilst a new poor law act or proclamation was issued every year, it was the kirk sessions that provided most relief. Fourth, a chapter devoted wholly to the migrational response to the ‘ill years’ makes it clear just how much social dislocation was generated by their accumulating effects, as thousands went in search of food or tried to slip their accumulating rent arrears, though parishes and burghs became less tolerant of strangers and vagabonds as the crisis progressed. Fifth, although stressed as a national famine, the last such famine in Scotland, Cullen is keen to draw out the marked regional and social differences that underpinned the ‘ill years’. That it had its most severe effects in the north and north-east and its least in the eastern Lowlands may not surprise, but its proportionately greater effect on adults rather than children does.

In a book that squeezes the lemon thrice dry in terms of how much it has to say on all aspects of the problem, it might be churlish to complain about what is missing or understated. Yet for all its coverage, more might have been made of the traditional mechanisms by which rural communities in some areas tried to mitigate some of the short-term effects of famine through the use of shell food, herbs, etc. Whilst it is right to emphasize the greater risks associated with spring-sown grains, more might also have been made of the differences between oats and barley, with the latter being sown later and harvested earlier than the former, providing communities in the north and north-west with some buffering against risk. It is for this reason that farmers in Iceland actually retreated out of oats into barley during the most severe phases of the Little Ice Age. Lastly, there are a number of references to marginal land and holdings being abandoned on a large scale in particular areas, like the north-east, but some of the contemporary observations that are used really need to be tested against more explicit data. Yet whatever its omissions, Famine in Scotland undoubtedly succeeds in giving an authoritative definition to the ‘ill years’ and in establishing it as a ‘demographic crisis of catastrophic proportions’. It also demonstrates just how much a study of this kind can gain from being wide-ranging and resourceful over the data used.