Control

The following is taken from the final chapter. Social control and economic control discussed earlier are brought together.

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Economy, Land and Control
 
Scotland was ideally placed in the early Middle Ages for economic one-sided development when animal skins, salmon etc., were valued as exchangeable commodities. The one-sided economic relationship with France was part of the lack of progress in that quarter when Scotland should have been working with as opposed to against England.
 
But if there was conflict abroad there was potential for more at home. The landlords controlled the food supply by maintaining the feudal system for as long as possible, longer than elsewhere in Europe. The products of the land accrued directly to them through a stranglehold over the mobility of labour at a time and for centuries when seven of every eight workers were tied to the land at various levels of the agricultural labour force. By controlling the quantity of money in the cot-toun and restricting capital availability to the tacksmen the main remuneration after accommodation was a carefully controlled truck payment of food which the work force had produced by its own hands.
 
With only a little leeway to produce a few extra vegetables the control over the staple of oatmeal, and later, potatoes was all that was needed to ‘convince’ the work-force that it needed no cash for unnecessary items such as spices or other exotic goods. Any surplus energy available for rebellion against such a regimen was easily deflected towards central Scottish, and later, English government.
 
With occasional peaks in the graph of general agricultural improvements occasioned perhaps by chance findings that turnips alleviated the need to kill all but the best cattle in autumn and that sheep did not need to be wintered inside, the general rate of progress was often behind England until communication and travel improved and the Industrial Revolution spread to the main areas of inhabited Scotland. The rather slow level of improvement in the diet, if not the overall standard of living in Scotland was dependent upon the factors stemming mainly from outside Scotland rather than from within it.
 
Prominent amongst those factors is commercialism as opposed to domestic economic policy and Scotland seems to have moved from a poverty to a fast-food diet without the probably necessary stages of becoming sufficiently agriculturally productive to maintain itself and still have a large enough surplus to help improve its international trading position.
 
If any one factor needs to be singled out, the economic misfortune of Scotland must carry the blame for the overall dietary deficit of the nation through history. France has been identified with that misfortune in terms of a one-sided economic relationship. 
 
Other aspects include Scotland’s own policy on trade with England as much as the vice versa, and its internal control of the food supply. Not least of those with overall control of the availability of food to the occupants of the but-and-ben [very small house] was the landed gentry which, as “a closed, cohesive and enduring group”10 amounted to being the bourgeoisie. Its control inevitably diminished “because the complexity and differentiation” of the developing society made it “difficult for any single group to wield power alone”. But the scars of that control are as plain as the old runrig channels from an aircraft.


The author knows nothing at present relating to equivalent Welsh history and this project will improve that situation. 

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The next page - Self-Identity - is the final page of the project itself .  After that, some resources are included.