, and laden with sacks or baskets. The
cultivation of the soil was poor; "the surface was generally
unenclosed; oats and barley the chief grain products; wheat little
cultivated; little hay made for winter; the horses then feeding chiefly
on straw and oats." "The arable land ran in narrow slips," with "stony
wastes between, like the moraines of a glacier." The hay meadow was an
undrained marsh, where rank grasses, mingled with rushes and other
aquatic plants, yielded a coarse fodder. About the time when George
the First became King of England, Lord Haddington introduced the sowing
of clover and other grass seeds. Some ten years earlier an
Englishwoman, Elizabeth Mordaunt, daughter of the Earl of Peterborough,
and wife of the Duke of Gordon, introduced into her husband's estates
English ploughs, English ploughmen, the system of fallowing up to that
time {89} unknown in Scotland, planted moors, sowed foreign grasses,
and showed the Morayshire farmers how to make hay.

[Sidenote: 1714--Famines in Scotland]

As a natural result of the primitive and incomplete agriculture, dearth
of food was frequent, and even severe famine, in all its horrors of
starvation and death, not uncommon. When George the First came to the
throne the century was not old enough for the living generation of
Scotchmen to forget the ghastly seven years that had brought the
seventeenth century to its close--seven empty ears blasted with
east-wind. So many died of hunger that, in the grim words of one who
lived through that time, "the living were wearied with the burying of
the dead." The plague of hunger took away all natural and relative
affections, "so that husbands had not sympathy for their wives, nor
wives for their husbands; parents for their children, nor children for
their parents." The saddest proof of the extent of the suffering is
shown in the irreligious despair which seized upon the sufferers.
Scotland then, as now, was strongly marked for its piety, but want made
men defiant of heaven, prepared, like her who counselled the man of Uz,
to curse God and die by the roadside. Warned by no dream of thin and
ill-favored kine, the Pharaohs of Westminster had passed an Act,
enforced while the famine was well begun, against the importation of
meal into Scotland. At the sorest of the famine, the importation of
meal from Ireland was permitted, and exportation of grain from Scotland
prohibited. But, in the beginning of the eighteenth centur