Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/247

 CHAPTER V.

SECTION III.

A SCOTTISH VILLAGE IN 1855.

Scottish village referred to, on which I have made a few notes, belonged, with all the surrounding country, to one of those Leviathan landholders, among some half-dozen of whom the greater part of Scotland is parcelled out, and who, unlike their English brother peers who profited by the plunder of the English Church lands at the Reformation in England, and rose at once from a humble station to be lords and knights, profess to trace their descent from kings and heroes of very remote times. I will not at present trouble the reader about those pedigrees, farther than to state that this village had once belonged to an Abbey, the ruins of which still remained in the condition in which they had been left at the Reformation in Scotland, and had come into the possession of the family of the present