Duke of
Sutherland is a title in the Peerage of the United
Kingdom which was created by William IV in 1833 for
George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Marquess of Stafford. A series
of marriages to heiresses by members of the Leveson-Gower
family made the Dukes of Sutherland one of the richest
landowning families in the United Kingdom. The title
remained in the Leveson-Gower family until the death of
the 5th Duke of Sutherland in 1963, when it passed to
John Egerton, 5th Earl of Ellesmere.
The 1st Duke and
Duchess of Sutherland remain controversial for their
role in the Highland Clearances, when thousands of
tenants were evicted and resettled in coastal villages.
This allowed the vacated land to be used for extensive
sheep farming, replacing the mixed farming carried out
by the previous occupants. This was part of the Scottish
Agricultural Revolution. The changes on the Sutherland
estate were motivated by two major objectives. The first
was to increase the rental income from the estate: sheep
farmers could afford much higher rents. The second was
to remove the population from the recurrent risks of
famine.
The Clearances
relied on the insecurity of tenure of most tenants under
the Scottish legal system. There was no equivalent of
the English system of copyhold, which provided a
heritable tenancy for many English counterparts of the
Scots who were cleared from their farms. The cumulative
effect of the Clearances and the large-scale emigrations
over the same period devastated the cultural landscape
of Scotland; in the end they destroyed much of Gaelic
culture.
The Clearances
resulted in significant emigration of Highlanders to the
coast, the Scottish Lowlands, and further afield to
North America and Australasia.
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