Ayrshire > Volume 1

CHAPTER XIII
THE SOCIAL MARCH OF THE SHIRE
THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO '
With the close of the feudal period, the incoming
of the second Reformation, and the union of the
Parliaments, Ayrshire left behind it the era of stress,
of turmoil, of the major troubles. Henceforward the
story is of progress in the ways of peaceful development,
of energies diverted from frays and from fights for the
faith to commercialism, to industrialism, to land
reform, to the betterment of agricultural conditions, to
the elevation of the people socially and morally.
But before leaving the earlier period, it will not be
uninteresting to look at the ordinary conditions of
social life, so far as these have been permitted to unfold
themselves for our instruction. The times, as we have
seen, were stormy and unsettled in the shire — in matters
of Church as well as of State, and in the relation in which
the great families stood to one another. When men's
minds are taken up with questions involving a change of
faith, and when men themselves are ranged in hostile
camps under conditions that render the highway and
the causeway alike dangerous ; when life is little thought
of and crime goes unpunished ; and when everywhere
there is a striving and a travailing towards specific ends
that cannot be attained by peaceful means, there is
neither much time nor much inclination for the softer