 In the early Middle Ages , poor transport forced self @-@ sufficiency on small settlements . Lacking the urban centres created under the Romans in the rest of Britain , the economy of Scotland in the early Middle Ages was overwhelmingly agricultural . With a lack of significant transport links and wider markets , most farms had to produce a self @-@ sufficient diet of meat , dairy products and cereals , supplemented by hunter @-@ gathering . Limited archaeological evidence indicates that throughout Northern Britain , farming was done on single homesteads or amongst a small cluster of three or four homes . Each of these probably contained a nuclear family , with kinship relationships likely to be common among neighbouring houses and settlements , reflecting the partition of land through inheritance . A system was adopted that distinguished between the infield , around the settlement , where crops were grown every year , and the outfield , further away , where crops were grown and then left fallow in different years . This would be the predominant system until the eighteenth century . 
