VIOLENCE IS OFTEN GIVEN a central place in accounts of male behaviour and identity in early modern Britain. The majority of violent crime was carried out by and against men, and violent behaviour served a variety of social functions related to gender identity. Violence was a resource that could be used by men of all social ranks across the lifecycle and in a variety of private and public contexts to assert status and to defend their honour. It was, therefore, one of the main props of patriarchy. For young men, violence was a component of coming of age and a means of demonstrating physical courage and strength, and it remained a tool of patriarchal power throughout men's lifecycles. Those who became independent heads of households (though achievement of this status was by no means universal) were expected to exert control over their dependents. Aggressive language and physical punishments could help them to maintain superior positions over women and servants. For those in subordinate positions, violence could be a means of claiming agency and resisting authority.

According to standard narratives, violent masculinity was tamed in the eighteenth century. Though its timing and reach in Scotland is debated, a ‘civilising process’ occurred here as throughout Europe. Conduct literature advocated the replacement of an outdated honour culture with new codes of politeness that emphasised self-restraint and problematised male aggression and the legal system was increasingly used to enforce new codes of male behaviour. Respectable men were expected to turn to legal mechanisms rather than to their fists or their swords to resolve disputes. Alongside the law, modernisation narratives afford commerce a central role in the acculturation of new codes of male behaviour. Indeed, Adam Smith's final phase of civilisation was ‘commercial society’. Modern commercial culture required new behavioural ideals and these ideals were adhered to, especially by an ‘upwardly mobile, modestly middle class’. For middling men, commercialism refined and polished individual passions and manners, and came to define new forms of prudential masculinity.