Crofting: Traditional British Land Tenure Enshrined In Law After Battles Of The 1880s

[Tony Gosling]

CROFTING: TRADITIONAL BRITISH LAND TENURE 
ENSHRINED IN LAW AFTER BATTLES OF THE 1880S

<http://tlio.org.uk/crofting-traditional-british-land-tenure-enshrined-in-law-after-battles-of-the-1880s/http://tlio.org.uk/crofting-traditional-british-land-tenure-enshrined-in-law-after-battles-of-the-1880s/>20/10/2017 
<http://tlio.org.uk/crofting-traditional-british-land-tenure-enshrined-in-law-after-battles-of-the-1880s/http://tlio.org.uk/author/tony/>TONY 
GOSLING<http://tlio.org.uk/crofting-traditional-british-land-tenure-enshrined-in-law-after-battles-of-the-1880s/http://tlio.org.uk/crofting-traditional-british-land-tenure-enshrined-in-law-after-battles-of-the-1880s/#respond>LEAVE 
A COMMENT 
<http://tlio.org.uk/crofting-traditional-british-land-tenure-enshrined-in-law-after-battles-of-the-1880s/http://tlio.org.uk/wp-admin/post.php?post=2987&action=edit>EDIT


<http://tlio.org.uk/crofting-traditional-british-land-tenure-enshrined-in-law-after-battles-of-the-1880s/http://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2012/05/crofters-wars.html>THE 
CROFTERS’ WARS
Crofting: Traditional British Land Tenure 
Enshrined In Law After Battles Of The 1880s

http://tlio.org.uk/crofting-traditional-british-land-tenure-enshrined-in-law-after-battles-of-the-1880s/



BBC2 The World About Us: The Corncrake and the Croft (1977)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSJNAFfX_K0

“The land under sheep and deer is my property and 
I can do with it what I like.” –  Lady Matheson


Crofters – A 1944 film showing life on Scottish crofts in wartime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU9EmSZvFSM

“Treasa tuath na tighearna.” (The people are 
mightier than a lord) – Highland Land League slogan

The common people of the Highlands and Islands 
had been cleared from large areas of their 
ancestral lands. The Highland Clearances had 
crammed the surviving remnants  into crammed 
crofting townships on very small areas of land 
where they were very vulnerable to abuse and 
exploitation by their landlords. Many lacked even 
crofts of their own and became cottars and 
squatters on the crofts of other people. 
Landlords turned most of the land over to use as 
sheep farms and deer forests. The creation of 
sheep farms, often comprising large tracts of 
empty, uncultivated and often fertile land, which 
hemmed in the congested townships on their 
boundaries, created social tensions, which 
unavoidably led to revolt among the 
disadvantaged. The farms established on Tiree in 
the 1840s and 1850s, having been forcibly cleared 
of their original occupants were but a few of the 
farms designated by crofters as suitable for 
resettlement by themselves.  In addition, in the 
1880s, the Highlands and Islands were ravaged by 
a decade of severe, occasionally chronic, 
agricultural depression. As wool prices 
collapsed, sheep farmers‘ profits and landlords‘ 
rentals fell back sharply from the heights they 
had reached in the balmy years of the 1860s and 
early 1870s. The poor harvests of 1881-1882 
plunged the crofting population to a level 
reminiscent of the potato famine. Then on 1st 
October 1882 after prolonged rain in August and 
September came a severe southerly gale that 
destroyed the unharvested grain. In addition, the 
storm damaged or destroyed some 1,200 fishing 
boats, their nets and fishing gear

A mass movement for the reform of land laws 
erupted in the 1880s. Links formed by radical 
crofters in the Highlands and industrial workers 
in the Lowlands worried the authorities: and the 
crofters leaders who attended conferences 
organised by the Labour movement in Edinburgh 
were followed and hounded by police officers. It 
has been argued that the the Crofters movement of 
the 19th century was a catalyst for the formation 
of various working-class organisations in 
Scotland and it has also been suggested that the 
influences were the other way, both describe the 
organic links between the struggles for land and workers rights.

The association between land reform and those 
movements claiming to be socialist  had always 
been more marked in Scotland. Before the 
emergence of Keir Hardie the principal workers 
organisation in Scotland, which was for a time 
affiliated with William Morris’s Socialist 
League, called itself the ‘Land and Labour 
League’. Far from wishing to be a carbon copy of 
the Social Democratic Federation, the Scots were 
keen to establish their own separate national 
identity. This was why they named  their 
organisation the Scottish Land and Labour League. 
In Scotland the Scottish Land and Labour League 
severed its connection with the SDF to join the break-away Socialist League.

“I was then a member of the Scottish Land and 
Labour League, in Edinburgh, Scotland. It must 
have been in the very early Eighties I guess in 
1883. The Scottish Land and Labour League was the 
first body in Scotland to take up the “New” 
Socialism, that is to say, it was the first to 
study Marx. Das Kapital had not yet been 
translated into English; we studied it from the 
French translation. We had affiliated ourselves 
with the Socialist League in London.” 
<http://tlio.org.uk/crofting-traditional-british-land-tenure-enshrined-in-law-after-battles-of-the-1880s/http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/KCentennial/Pages/23.html>describes<http://tlio.org.uk/crofting-traditional-british-land-tenure-enshrined-in-law-after-battles-of-the-1880s/http://libcom.org/history/bell-tom-1867-1942>Thomas 
H Bell (the anarchist, not the later Communist Party Tom Bell)

So much emphasis is placed on select Jewish 
participation in Bormann companies that when 
Adolf Eichmann was seized and taken to Tel Aviv 
to stand trial, it produced a shock wave in the 
Jewish and German communities of Buenos Aires. 
Jewish leaders informed the Israeli authorities 
in no uncertain terms that this must never happen 
again because a repetition would permanently 
rupture relations with the Germans of Latin 
America, as well as with the Bormann 
organization, and cut off the flow of Jewish 
money to Israel. It never happened again, and the 
pursuit of Bormann quieted down at the request of 
these Jewish leaders. He is residing in an 
Argentinian safe haven, protected by the most 
efficient German infrastructure in history as 
well as by all those whose prosperity depends on his well-being.
<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fspitfirelist.com%2Fbooks%2Fmartin-bormann-nazi-in-exile%2F&h=eAQErj17O>http://spitfirelist.com/books/martin-bormann-nazi-in-exile/   
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