164 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



Were there twenty tenants and as many fields, each tenant Would 

 think himself unjustly treated, unless he had a proportionate 

 share in each." ^ Of the Orkneys, too, he writes, " Much land 

 that formerly lay in the state known in Scotland under the name 

 of run-rig land has been divided, but much still remains in the 

 same situation ... a source of constant dispute." ^ At the 

 other end of Scotland, in Berwickshire, runrig was at least a 

 memory. The reporter notes that " the common fields, runrig, 

 and rundale lands in the county were all divided previous to any 

 attempt to improve them by inclosing." ^ 



Certain passing remarks of other reporters indicate more exactly 

 the nature of the intermixed property, and at the same time point 

 to its prevalence throughout Scotland. Most illuminating of all 

 is the report from southern Perthshire by James Robertson, D.D. 

 " The husbandry of the particular district under consideration," 

 says he, " was in a most wretched condition, even so late as 

 fifty years ago. The land was always occupied in run-rigg by 

 the different tenants on the same farm and sometimes by coter- 

 minous heritors. The houses were in clusters for the mutual 

 protection of the inhabitants, and the farms were universally 

 divided into out-field and in-field except in the neighborhood 

 of the larger towns." * The intermixed strips of the several 

 tenants, we now perceive, were those of a single farm, and the 

 method of tillage called runrig had the farm as its unit. Robert- 

 son's further comment makes the matter clearer. Discussing 

 production and population, he uses this illustration: " No man 

 will venture to say, that a farm of fifty acres in the hands of four 

 tenants, who have each a horse in the plough, and their ground 

 mixed in run-rig, will produce the quantity of subsistence, which 

 the same farm can do in the hands of one man, who has both 

 money and industry to cultivate the ground. With respect to 



^ Northern Counties and Islands, p. 207. 



^ Ibid., 227. 



' Berwick, p. 50. 



* Southern Perth (1794), p. 22. In the second edition (General View of the Agri- 

 culture in the County oj Perth, 1799), the author adds that there were clusters 

 of farms " even to the number in some cases of six or eight ploughs of land in 

 one hamlet." 



