30 April 2014

 A ‘Parasitic Middle Class’ or ‘Too Good to Lose’ Restoring the eighteenth-century tacksmen of Badenoch to their rightful status

Talk by David Taylor

Ross House, Dornoch.

Organised by UHI Centre for History. Further details  from Kirsty Reid - kirsty.reid@uhi.ac.uk

Description

No social group in the history of the eighteenth-century Highlands has been more vilified or misunderstood than the tacksmen. It has generally been accepted that with the demise of the military functions of the clan, not only did this traditionally important class lose its raison d’etre, but that estates were desperate to remove them from their function as economic middlemen: hence the well-documented tacksman-led migrations from the western seaboard in the 1770s.

This paper challenges those conclusions, demonstrating through a detailed study of the central Highlands, that this west-coast picture was certainly not universal. In Badenoch the tacksmen did not emigrate, but remained as social and economic leaders of the community right into the nineteenth century, regarded by the Gordon estates as too valuable to be driven out, and at times, too powerful to challenge.