Patricia & Others Interested in "Cottar House", Having come from a long line of "farm servants" or "cottars" I have collected some references to the term "cottar" from my relatives in Northeast Scotland over the years. A special thanks for the following to my fourth cousin, Christine Mary (Mackenzie) Glover, of the Tay Valley History Centre. Dave Petrie Arden Hills, Minnesota ===================================================== "Grandfather, Robert Petrie, was born in the parish of Inverkeillor in Forfarshire, otherwise known as Angus, and it was this area and just over the border into Kincardineshire, in which all his known ancestors were found. The following description of farm servant hiring practices described below probably apply to the eighteenth and early ninteenth century. The countryside of these two counties is mainly agricultural land, with the North Sea to the East and the Grampian Mountains to the North and West. Consequently, most of the Petries worked on the land as agricultural labourers or farm servants. As can be seen from places of residence mentioned in the Parish Registers at the time of family events, they often moved from one farm to another so it is probable that they took part in the hiring fairs common at that time. 'The Ballad and the Plough' by David Kerr Cameron includes the following passages about the hiring of farm workers in North-East Scotland:' There was hard bargaining done in the cottars' markets but they were gentlemanly affairs conpared with the big feeing fairs; mainly for the single men, their notoriety was a byword in the bothies of the land. ["Bothie" or "bothy" was a kind of Scottish "bunkhouse" for young single men working on a farm.] There the men of the farmtowns hired their brawn and their skills to the highest bidder and bound themselves to that bargain for a six-month [period]. They were held, these hiring fairs, in every principal town in the country, a few days to a fortnight before the terms, 28 May and 28 November, the dates on which a farm servant officially ended his engagement at a farm-toun. The fair names differed but the scene they presented was remarkably similar: a slow-moving mass, a figure detaching itself from a group here, adhering to another there, knots of men sundering with handshakes, all of them farm folk little at ease in a town environment. Besides the ploughman lads, there were kitchen maids who had pleased their mistresses too little or their masters too well; orra men who had done orra work and stockmen who could not rise in the morning. The occasion had its own protocol. Moves were measured, cautious, circumspect; gambits so veiled as to slip past undetected by the inexperienced for whom, unknown, the day might turn into a vale of missed opportunities. It was a slow dance, a verbal minuet. Among the milling folk, a servant would wait to be approached with an offer, with a hint perhaps from a former bothy colleague. A champion ploughman might do well enough, or a man known to be a good workman whatever his particular skill. 'It was a chancy business; a man might stand all day and not have his services sought after for there was a kind of grapevine amoung grieves that whispered the worth of a man one to another, pin-pointing his frailties as a servant and sometimes as a man. They wheedled and dealed but it was the farmer or the grieve he invariably brought with him who had the upper hand for there was always a spectre at the fair; the stark dark dread of unemployment.' "Accommodation would be limited, most of their houses having two or three rooms with a window, but presumably not as crowded and gloomy as the black houses. 'Scotland's Past In Action - Farming' gives the following descriptions of cottar housing which would probably have been similar to the houses they occupied:'Except for the houses that went with some special occupations such as cattleman or byreman, the cottar hooses were also separate from the steadings - usually in a row. The most basic consisted of one room and a garden for vegetables. New housing soon became miserable and ramshackle, and only a marginal improvement on the old. Clay floors were still the standard, but the new tiled roofs were draughty and provided poor insulation, for there were often no ceilings.'Of the complaints voiced by Scottish farmworkers, housing rather than wages was usually the main one. The often semi-isolataed existence, and bringing up a large family in tied and ramshackle accommodation made the wives frequent champions of emigration to villages, towns or beyond.'" The following passages for "Scotland's Past in Action" and "The Ballad and the Plough" give some idea of the conditions experienced by "farm servants"."North of the Forth, and north of the Tay in particular, for unmarried young men there was the life of the bothies. The system flourished, because the farmers got good value for money in the pride the men took in their work. It was condemned by the guardians of social morality because of the mens' insolence and disregard of organized religion. The bothy, usually part of the steadings, had a bunk-house and a living room with a fireplace. Each man's possession went into one or later two kists, the mealer and the claeser. As the May or November term approached, so did the speakin time. Then the farmer would ask a man if he wished to bide. If the farmer remained silent, the contract would not be renewed, and the man would have to go to the feeing market and seek another place. On the other hand, if the men had fallen out with the farmer or his wife, they might all go, leaving the farmer with a clean toun, a bad name and a new set of men to find." "The cottar folk of the farm touns, travelled light. Each year usually at eh Whitsunday Term but sometimes the Martinmas term one as well, they threw their pitifully few possessions into a farm cart and took the road to a new toun, like pilgrims to a promised land. Few in fact travelled hopefully for the years had taught them better, but in time the May 'flitting' became an addiction, a rootless custom of a rootless society. It may even have been a kind of protest against the tied-cottage tyranny of that time that made married farm servant - a skilled grieve, ploughman, baillie, or orra man - give his wife and children as hostages to fortune [From Chambers Scots Dictionary "bail(l)ie: a farm-steward; a man or boy in charge of the cows on a farm; grieve: a farm-overseer; a foreman; orra-man: a farm-labourer who does odd jobs and not stated work (from orra: unmatched, odd, without a fellow; occasional, doing odd jobs; having no settled occupation)."]. In addition to his 'fee' for his years engagement (paid to him weekly and in such small doses as barely to keep them all alive, with the balance half-yearly), he had the use of a house and his perquisites, those staples of Scottish existence: oatmeal, milk, potatoes, and coal or peat to keep his fire burning. Charitable though it might seem, it was an iniquitous system that blemished the name of many a good farm toun and gave the unscrupulous farmer an unbeatable advantage. Where a single, bothy lad with a mother's house to go home to if it came to it, could tell a miserly or tyrannical farmer what he thought of him and fare little the worse for it, the cottar, with his family to think of, could hardly afford to. This fact set him at a permanent disadvantage in the feeing market, too, and he was often viciously exploited. Many of today's farming dynasties were shamefully founded on the wealth that came from squeezing such men into penury.""In the new farmtoun society that emerged - tenants, cottars and bothy-housed men - his special commitments made the cottar's lot the least enviable. The cheapness and ready availability of farmtoun labour were the constants that ever undermined him. There was always a man on his back, behind him in the queur, ready to take a shilling or two less and in more urgent need of the tied cottar house. But it was not lack of intelligence that snared him forever in the fields of some cottar-toun, it was the pinching poverty. It made sure that he had no room for manoeuvre. Often it robbed him of all dignity."