To a Mouse: Historical & Literary Context

The Scottish Agricultural Revolution

The Scottish Agricultural Revolution refers to the transformation of farming practices that took place in Scotland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Following the formal union between Scotland and England in 1707, the Scottish gentry sought ways to improve the state of agriculture in their domain. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a society dedicated to agricultural improvement introduced new crops and technologies from England—most notably the English plow. Scottish farmers also began to practice crop rotation during this time.

These new crops, technologies, and practices enabled more intensive exploitation of the soil, and hence more profits for the gentry. Yet the success of the new agriculture negatively affected the peasantry. For one thing, it led to the enclosure of the commons, which made many public lands private. As the landscape became increasingly commercialized in this way, landlords felt emboldened to inflate rents, which resulted in thousands of tenant farmers and farm laborers known as “cottars” losing their homes and livelihoods. This sweeping of the countryside became known as the Lowland Clearances. Burns composed his poem about a mouse getting turned out of her nest in 1785, at the height of this tragic sweep.

Vernacular Verse

Burns famously wrote his verses in the Scots dialect of the English language. At a time when English had become somewhat standardized, the appearance of verses written in a regional dialect excited many readers. This excitement was particularly the case among readers in metropolitan centers like Edinburgh, who found in Burns’s poems a rustic charm they associated with a romanticized rural life. This rustic charm links Burns’s work to the history of European vernacular verse.

The term vernacular refers to the language used by the common people. In the European context, the word indicated any language that wasn’t the language of scholars or the liturgical language of the Catholic Church—that is, Latin. During the Middle Ages, numerous poets turned away from writing in Latin, choosing instead to write in their vernacular tongues. Dante Alighieri, for instance, composed his masterpiece The Divine Comedy in Italian. Likewise, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his great pilgrimage romp The Canterbury Tales in English. Many other writers followed suit, thereby breaking the dominance of Latin and establishing foundations for what would become the various European national literatures. Burns, writing in his own dialect of Scots English, belongs to this venerable lineage.