The problems of investigating the standard of living in Scotland at any point before the mid twentieth century are enormous, as they must be for any country before government begins to collect modern statistical data on income, prices and employment. These problems are of two kinds: conceptual, concerning the nature and meaning of a ‘standard of living’, and practical, concerning the accumulation of appropriate evidence.

The first kind we shall for the moment side step, defining for our purposes the standard of living as what contributes to real income, whether in money or in kind: that is to say, we assume the standard to be rising if wages rise faster than prices and if employment opportunities for an individual or family remain the same or, better, improve. This admittedly dodges very real problems of having to weight benefits and costs, if higher incomes are accompanied (as no doubt they often were) by more laborious toil or a deteriorating environment for life at home and work.

The second problem is the evidential one. What sort of data are relevant to the exploration of the standard of living? They may be both qualitative and quantitative, but those on which Scottish historians have chiefly relied for their judgements before 1800 have hitherto mainly been qualitative – i.e., the broad opinions of contemporaries concerning what was happening in the world about them.