Rural Occupation. 15 



right adapted to the time in a single comprehensive 

 sentence, thus " For the safety and favour of the puir 

 pepil that labouris the grunde, that all tenants having 

 tacks for a term of years shall enjoy their tacks to the 

 ish of their terms, suppose the lords sell or analy their 

 lands." Another statute of James I. (1424), titled " Of 

 bigging of ruikes in trees," in respect that the said 

 ruikes " does" great " skaith upon comes," provides 

 for a penalty upon those who fail to despatch the young 

 birds before they have flown from their nests. And 

 there was a statute of the same monarch binding every 

 man " tillan with a pleuch of aucht oxen" to sow a 

 certain quantity of wheat, pease, and beans yearly. Mr. 

 Innes points out, as an interesting and creditable fact 

 in the history of the social life of the rural population, 

 that the amelioration of the condition of the nativi or 

 serfs belonging to the land was accomplished voluntarily 

 during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. "From 

 the thirteenth century, when the serfs must have 

 formed a large proportion of the population ; when 

 gifts of serfs and sales of serfs, and claims of runaway 

 slaves, are of as frequent occurrence as any transactions 

 connected with land between that century and the 

 end of the fifteenth, hereditary slavery had ceased among 

 us without any legislative act." From the beginning of 

 the sixteenth century, the serf, formerly an important 

 adjunct of the glebe, has disappeared, and we have a 

 free agricultural class ; a rather remarkable result, 

 certainly, to be wrought out naturally and without the 

 intervention of Parliament. 



During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and greater part 

 of the eighteenth century, we can trace the general 

 features of the old rural economy. Lord Forbes's rental, 

 of date 1532, quoted by Mr. Innes, shows the land 

 divided into ploughs, each of eight ox:en : the plough- 

 gate being "sometimes let to four tenants, each of 

 whom contributed the work of his pair of oxen to the 

 common plough. These joint tenants were bound to 



