Growing up in Earlston

So I guess I should start at the beginning. Thomas is said to come from Ercildoune, known now as Earlston, a town on the banks of the Leader in the Scottish border region. There is even a ruined tower in Earlston which is known as "Rhymers Tower" - pictured here. Sadly Scotland's Places suggests that this building actually dates from the 16th century, but this doesn't stop the various guidebooks and tourism websites from listing it as his home or even his place of birth.

So how might Thomas's childhood really have been? In 13th Century Scotland there were basically two types of buildings. The wealthy and powerful lived in stone castles or towers, had servants, and owned more or less substatial land holdings. The majority of the population lived in small mud and thatch cottages, either farming small plots of land on which they may have been tenants or had some form of ownership, or if they were poorer still selling their labour to anyone who would buy. They would have had a meagre diet - mostly oats and mutton with whatever fruit was in season and growing readily (blackberries, perhaps, or apples) maybe some fish if they lived near a productive stream, and maybe some game if they could catch it. In a good year they would eat well, in a bad year they would go hungry.

If you were living this kind of life, Earlston would be a good place to do it. It has a nice clear river as well as a small stream. It has rich soil, rolling hills, a reasonably benign climate, plenty of rainfall. It would be a good place to raise sheep or cattle, grow grain, fish in the stream and hunt in the woods.

The question is, what kind of life did Thomas have? Was it the life of luxury in the stone tower, or the life of toil in the mud hut? Clearly at the end of his life he had a modest amount of property, as you would expect from a seer and bard patronised by the Earls of Dunbar. Did he always have this, or did he acquire it in later life?

I would suggest that he must have had enough wealth at least for his parents to have him taught to read and write (hence his later reputation as a poet) and his family would have been well enough off to own a musical instrument of some sort, for him to learn on. Unless, of course, he learnt all this in elf-land! Thus I imagine him growing up as the child of a small holder - definitely a mud-hut dweller, but a mud hut surrounded by some land on which sheep grazed and perhaps a little grain grew, a mud hut that at least was in good repair, and kept out the rain and the cold. He would have eaten simply, but rarely gone hungry. But he would have had to work - minding sheep, cutting wood for the fire, planting and harvesting, collecting wild fruit. When he finally spent time among the rich and powerful, he would be shocked at their laziness and their extravagance - or perhaps intrigued and attracted.