The process of Scottish agrarian ‘improvement’ has been largely portrayed in terms of commercialisation and the drive to maximise estate incomes, a process that went hand in hand with the erosion of feudal practices and fundamentally altered the relationship between landlords and those who resided upon their estates. As one historian of Scottish agrarian change has described, ‘paternalistic traditions of the older world came under enormous pressure’, while for another, what was left of ‘lingering paternalism’ was ‘eliminated under the pressure of the commercial ethos’. However, the relationship between paternalism and improvement is perhaps more complex and nuanced than these statements would suggest. Part of the problem of this interpretation is that it implies that the relationship between the landowner and the tenant had already been reduced to a purely economic one and the landed estate into a purely commercial enterprise. However, a great landed estate in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries remained a social and political construct as well as an economic one and its management had to take into account the wider social and political interests of the landowner, something that – if anything – became even more relevant during the period under examination. One element of this was the continuing role of traditional attitudes, from both the landlord and the tenant, something that had a particular resonance on a Border estate. Up until the end of the sixteenth century, the social bond of a family ‘name’ in the Borders had functioned in a similar manner to the clan in the Highlands, and even as late as the 1680s it was still stipulated that the assessors for each district in a survey of the Buccleuch estate should themselves be ‘Scotts’. Notions of attachment to the ducal family and paternalistic attitudes in estate management persisted on the Buccleuch estates well into the nineteenth century. However, although some of these attitudes can be explained as the survival of traditional loyalties – particularly on an estate where the tenancies of farms had often been handed down through families for generations – the kind of paternalism employed on the Buccleuch estate was much more than merely the vestige of an earlier system. Indeed, rather than declining, it seems that under Duke Henry there was a resurgence of such traditions and attitudes.