SCOTLAND BETWEEN 1329 AND 1437
LIFE IN THE RURAL DISTRICTS
In the country, too, there had been few changes, and till the reign of James I these were mainly for the worse. It was folly to build more than a turf hovel, with an ox-hide for a door, when the English raiders might destroy the dwelling at any moment; it was folly to have broad corn lands, for corn had to be left to the invader, while cattle could be driven into the mountains. James made an attempt to bring more land under cultivation; all countrymen were required either to have “half an ox in the plough” or else to dig each day a portion of land seven feet square. He so tried to make the farmers grow more than the customary barley and oats; each man possessing an eight-ox plough was expected to sow at leas a firlot (=2 gallons 1 pint) of wheat, half a firlot of pease, and forty beans.
Life, it seems to us, must have been dull to the dwellers on the land, at the best an unending fight with a stubborn soil, at the worst a time of terror, when their homesteads were fired, their corn trampled underfoot and they themselves driven to the mountains with what they could save of their cattle. “The common people are poor and destitute of all refinement,” said Aeneas Sylvius. “They are like savages,” was the verdict of Froissart. But often in the long winter evenings some rollicking tale must have kept the some-filled hut in a roar, or singing and dancing “helped waste a sullen day.” Only the names of these old songs remain; “Pardonnez.” Late, late on evenings,” “By you woodside,” “My dear darling” – pitiful relics of dead men out of mind.
But the country-folk had other recreations. They were fond of football, though the King frowned upon it, and ordered everyman who played to be fined fourpence. The time which was wasted over it, he thought, could more profitably be given to archery, for in every defeat which the Scots had suffered at the hands of the English, from Dupplin to Verneuil, they had been outmatched by the English archers; when they had been victorious as at Baugé and Otterburn, the English archers had not come into play. So by King James’s orders all men above twelve years of age had to “busk them to be archers.” On all estates worth more than £10 a year bow-marks were to be set up, “at specially near parish kirks, where upon holy days men may come and at the least shoot thrice about and have usage of archery.” Then four times a year there was the “wapenschawing,” when all the able-blooded men of the country between sixteen and sixty had to be reviewed by the sheriff. Each gentleman having land worth over £10 a year appeared on horseback, in complete armour, with sword, lance, and dagger. The men-at-arms, mounted on lighter horses, were drawn from the poorer entry and the prosperous yeomen. The bulk of the yeomen were armed either with bows, swords, bucklers, and knives, or, if they were not archers, with axes or spears. If we are to believe Aeneas Sylvius, the men were for the most part small in stature. Their women-folk were probably looking on, “fair in complexion, comely and pleasing,” according to some observer, arrayed after the rank of their husbands, the great ladies in the costly embroideries, silks, furs, and head-dresses of lawn that were forbidden to their humbler sisters, however wealthy they might be.
The same sumptuary laws applied to the men. Only knights and lords worth over £200 a year were allowed to wear silks, costly furs, embroidery, pearls, and bullion; those of lower degree had to content themselves with the “honest array” of belts, brooches, and chains, and in towns no one below the rank of bailie could wear furs. At the wolf-hunts, which were held by the order of the baron four times a year, one might see the country-folk in their weeds of peace, the baron’s retainers in gaily coloured garments with narrow sleeves and little pockets hanging from them, and the yeomen in sad-coloured raiment, for the King had ordained that no yeoman was to wear “hewit (coloured) clathes. . . na yit ragyt clathes.”
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