The family in early modern Scotland includes all aspects of kinship and family life, between the Renaissance and the Reformation of the sixteenth century and the beginnings of industrialisation and the end of the Jacobite risings in the mid-eighteenth century in Scotland.
Scottish kinship in this period was agnatic, with descent judged through a common ancestor, helping to create the surname system in the Borders and the clans in the Highlands, with these systems beginning to break down in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively. There was considerable concern over the safety of children. The abolition of godparents in the Reformation meant that baptism became a mechanism for emphasising the role and responsibilities of fathers. Wet-nurses were used for young children, but in most families mothers took the primary role in bringing up children, while the Kirk emphasised the role of the father for older children. After the Reformation there was an increasing emphasis on education, resulting in the growth of a parish school system, but its effects were limited for the children of the poor and for girls. Most children left home for a period of life-cycle service, as domestic or agricultural servants or as apprentices before marriage.
Marriages were often the subject of careful negotiations, particularly higher in society. Marriage lost its sacramental status at the Reformation and irregular marriage continued to be accepted as valid throughout the period. Women managed the household and might work beside their husbands and, although obedience to husbands was stressed, this may have been limited in practice. Divorce developed after the Reformation and was available for a wider range of causes and accessed by a much larger section of society than in England. Because of high mortality rates widowhood was a relatively common state, and some women acquired independence and status, but others were forced into a marginal existence and remarriage was common. The elaborate funerals and complex system of prayers for the dead that dominated in late Medieval Scotland were removed at the Reformation and simpler services adopted. Burial inside the church was discouraged. As a result separate aisles for the rich and graveyards with stone markers for the majority became common.
Kinship
Unlike in England, where kinship was predominately cognatic (derived through both males and females), in early modern Scotland kinship was agnatic (with members of a group sharing a, sometimes fictional, common ancestor through only the male line). Women retained the original surname of their family of origin at marriage and marriages were intended to create alliances between kin groups, rather than a new bond of kinship that joined two families together.J. Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), , pp. 29–35. In the Borders, on both the English and Scottish sides, there were extensive bonds of kinship, often reflected in a common surname. A shared surname has been seen as a "test of kinship", proving large bodies of kin who could call on each other’s support. At the beginning of the period this could help intensify the idea of the feud. Feuds were semi-formalised disputes, often motivated by revenge for past actions against a member of kin. In a surname system large bodies of kin could be counted on to support rival sides, resulting in long-term local warfare, although conflict between members of kin groups also occurred.J. W. Armstrong, "The 'fyre of ire Kyndild' in the fifteenth-century Scottish Marches", in S. A. Throop and P. R. Hyams, eds, Vengeance in the Middle Ages: Emotion, Religion and Feud (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), , p. 71. From the reign of James VI (r. 1567–1625), systems of judicial law were enforced, aided by the Union of Crowns in 1603 that dissolved much of the political significance of the border.R. Mitchison, Lordship to Patronage, Scotland 1603–1745 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), , pp. 15–16. The leadership of the heads of the great surnames was largely replaced by the authority of landholding lairds in the seventeenth centuryMitchison, Lordship to Patronage, p. 92. and by the early eighteenth century the feud had been almost completely suppressed.
The combination of agnatic kinship and the feudal system, which formalised mutual obligations of service and protection, organised through heritable jurisdictions, has been seen as creating the Highland clan system.G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce (Berkeley CA.: University of California Press, 1965), p. 7. The head of a clan was usually the eldest son of the last chief of the most powerful sept or branch.J. L. Roberts, Clan, King, and Covenant: History of the Highland Clans from the Civil War to the Glencoe Massacre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), , p. 13. The leading families of a clan formed the fine, often seen as equivalent to Lowland lairds, providing council in peace and leadership in war,M. J. Green, The Celtic World (London: Routledge, 1996), , p. 667. and below them were the daoine usisle (in Gaelic) or tacksmen (in Scots), who managed the clan lands and collected the rents.D. Moody, Scottish Family History (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Com, 1994), , pp. 99–104. Most of the followers of the clan were tenants, who supplied labour to the clan heads and could be called upon to act as soldiers when needed. In the early modern era they usually took the clan name as their surname, turning it into a massive, if often fictive, kin group. Economic change and the imposition of royal justice had begun to undermine the clan system before the eighteenth century, but the process was accelerated after the Jacobite rising of 1745. Highland dress was banned, clansmen were forcible disarmed, there was the compulsory purchase of heritable jurisdictions, many chiefs were exiled and ordinary clansmen were sent to the colonies as indentured labourers. Within a generation, these factors reduced most clan leaders to the status of simple landholders, without independent military power.Mitchison, Lordship to Patronage, pp. 166–7.
Childhood
There was considerable concern over the safety of mother and child in birth.E. Ewen, "The early modern family" in T. M. Devine and J. Wormald, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), , p. 277. Although childbirth was a predominantly female event, with neighbours and midwives in support, the father was often present in or near the birthing chamber to assert, or in the cases of birth outside marriage to admit, his paternity.M. Hollander, "The name of the Father": baptism and the social construction of fatherhood in early modern Edinburgh", in E. Ewan and J. Nugent, eds, Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), , p. 66. Before the Reformation, baptism was a means of creating wider spiritual kinship with godparents,Ewen, "The early modern family", p. 278. but in the reformed Kirk, godparents were abolished and the baptismal ceremony was used primarily as a means of strengthening the "natural" relationship of the child with the parents and to define their roles. This was particularly focused on the father, who would have the primary responsibility for the moral and spiritual education of the child.Hollander, "The name of the Father", p. 68. Among the elite of Highland society, there existed a system of fosterage that created similar links to godparenthood, with children being sent to the households of other major families to facilitate the creation of mutual bonds, that often endured into later life.
Following birth it was common, particularly among richer families, to employ a wet-nurse to care for the child, sometimes living in with the family. Few sources give an insight into the experiences of young children in this period. Some parents played with their children and parents demonstrated grief at their loss. The primary responsibility for bringing up young children fell on the mother. For older children, the major duty of parents was, according to the Kirk, to ensure the spiritual development of the child, with fathers leading daily family prayers, but it is not clear how widely these practices were adopted.
Youth and education
Historians debate whether early modern individuals experienced a period of youth in the modern sense. For many the early teens were marked by moving away from home to undertake life-cycle service, which was necessary so that they could build up skills and capital that would enable them to marry and create a separate household. Lower down in society boys might be apprenticed to a trade, or become agricultural servants. Girls might go into domesticEwen, "The early modern family", p. 279. or agricultural service. For those higher up in society and increasingly for those lower down, this might be after a period of schooling or even university.
The Humanist concern with widening education that had become significant in the Renaissance was shared by Protestant reformers.R. A. Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity: Illiteracy and Society in Scotland and Northern England, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), , p. 5. For boys, in the burghs the old schools were maintained, with the song schools and a number of new foundations becoming reformed grammar schools or ordinary parish schools. There were also large number of unregulated "adventure schools", which sometimes fulfilled a local needs and sometimes took pupils away from the official schools.M. Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (Yale University Press, 2002), , pp. 59–62. At their best, the curriculum included catechism, Latin, French, Classical literature and sports.Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625, pp. 183–3. A series of acts attempted to establish schools in every parish from 1616.. By the late seventeenth century there was a largely complete network of parish schools in the Lowlands, but in the Highlands basic education was still lacking in many areas.R. Anderson, "The history of Scottish Education pre-1980", in T. G. K. Bryce and W. M. Humes, eds, Scottish Education: Post-Devolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2nd edn., 2003), , pp. 219–28.
The widespread belief in the limited intellectual and moral capacity of women, vied with a desire, intensified after the Reformation, for women to take personal moral responsibility, particularly as wives and mothers. In Protestantism this necessitated an ability to learn and understand the catechism and even to be able to independently read the Bible, but most commentators, even those that tended to encourage the education of girls, thought they should not receive the same academic education as boys. In the lower ranks of society, they benefited from the expansion of the parish schools system that took place after the Reformation, but were usually outnumbered by boys, often taught separately, for a shorter time and to a lower level. They were frequently taught reading, sewing and knitting, but not writing. Female illiteracy rates based on signatures among female servants were around 90 percent, from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries and perhaps 85 percent for women of all ranks by 1750, compared with 35 per cent for men.Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity, pp. 63–8. Among the nobility there were many educated and cultured women, of which Mary, Queen of Scots is the most obvious example.K. Brown, Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family and Culture from Reformation to Revolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), , p. 187.
Marriage