Highland Land League - Background

Background

In the 1880s the common people or peasantry of the Highlands and Islands had been cleared from large areas of their ancestral lands, the clearances (known as the Highland Clearances) having occurred during the decades following the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Many emigrated to North America. Many who did not emigrate were crammed into 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 hunting parks called deer forests. In addition, in the 1880s, the Highlands and Islands were recently ravaged by the potato famine of the mid 19th century. The 1880s were also a time, however, of growing democracy and of government which was increasingly responsive to public opinion, particularly after the electoral reform Act of 1884.

In the early 1880s, in terms of gaining sympathetic public opinion, crofters were protesting very effectively, with rent strikes and land raids, about their lack of secure tenure of land and their severely reduced access to land. The government responded in 1883 with a commission of enquiry headed by Francis Napier, and the Napier Commission published recommendations in 1884. Napier's report fell a long way short of addressing crofters' demands, and it stimulated a new wave of protests.