Domestic Industries and Out-door Labour. 141 



plant was grown more extensively; the area in flax 

 in the Mearns, so late as 1807, being 236 acres. The 

 spinning of flax afforded much employment to women 

 in the Buchan and Strathbogie districts of Aberdeen- 

 shire about 1780; and at that date a good spinner 

 could earn sixpence, and in some cases sevenpence 

 a-day at her wheel, which seems to have been the 

 maximum wage ever attained at this particular in- 

 dustry. Between spinning and knitting worsted, and 

 spinning flax, the time of the Aberdeenshire women 

 may be supposed to have been pretty fully occupied. 

 It was so as matter of fact occupied, one may venture 

 to think, in a very suitable fashion. And so we have 

 a tourist at the opening of the present century recording 

 it as what appeared surprising to him that " he did not 

 perceive a single female employed in field labour " in 

 Aberdeenshire ; such labour being " executed by men," 

 contrary to the practice of the southern counties, 

 " where work of that kind was performed by girls and 

 boys," while the men worked the horses in the summer 

 months. Other writers tell of the barbarous way in 

 which the women in certain regions were made to do 

 the roughest out-door labour as occasion required. 

 Especially was this the case in certain Highland and 

 half -Highland parts, where the inert lord of the creation 

 would lie on his hip and complacently look on while 

 his wife did the most menial and fatiguing labour on 

 the croft, even to the extent, as has been already said, 

 of carrying the contents of the scanty dunghill a-field 

 on her back ! 



But in the north-eastern section of Scotland there 

 was little to complain of either as to fitness in the distri- 

 bution of labour as between the sexes, or the amount 

 that each was expected to accomplish. In the years 

 of childhood a certain measure of schooling was deemed 

 needful. With girls it hardly went beyond giving 

 them the capability of reading in a moderate degree ; 

 not always so far. Writing was regarded more in the 



