THE BACKGROUND

At the end of the eighteenth century the people of Morvern were poised between an unstable and often bloody past, and a future dissolution of the social order that would cause their descendants to look back even on this lean and uncertain time as to a golden age. Civil war and armed feud, they knew, lingered only in the memories of the old; a benevolent lord watched from a comfortable distance over the interests of his lands and his tenants; and men felt that they were members of an interesting and notable society, established on ground which they considered (however mistakenly) that they had a right to occupy. Poor they may have seemed, but poverty is relative, and they had been poorer before. The insecurity of their position was similarly difficult for them to grasp; they could not foresee what would happen when their landlords died or sold up, could not understand that the apparent strength of their economy was delusive, could not believe that the very size of their teeming families would bring their own downfall.

Such comfort and stability as the parish enjoyed in the later eighteenth century was largely due to the rule of the Argyll family.