Introduction to the sources

Wages were highly complex in early modern society, in Scotland as elsewhere. They might be paid entirely in money or entirely in kind, or in a mixture of both. They might be paid differently to the same person for different kinds of work (money with food at harvest, money alone for other day labour). They might be paid at a higher rate in summer than in winter. They would certainly be paid higher to some categories of worker than to others. The jobs might be described by age and sex as well as by skill and task (‘herd lass’, ‘journeyman wright’), but what was understood by certain critical terms (‘master mason’, ‘agricultural servant’) might vary nevertheless from one period to another or from one locality to another. Any attempt at the objective measurement of change through time is clearly going to be fraught with difficulties.

In our investigation we have used four kinds of evidence; wages from accounts extracted from the account books and papers of employers (tables 8.1–8.7); assessed wages, statements of maximum wage rates set down by town councils and justices of the peace (tables 8.8–8.10); estimated wages as reported retrospectively by the ministers and others in the Statistical account of the 1790s (tables 8.11–8.16), and poll-tax wages (tables 8.17–8.18) as declared to the authorities who levied a percentage tax on wages in the 1690s.