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The Napier Commission, officially the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Condition of Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands was a royal commission and public inquiry into the condition of crofters and cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The commission was appointed in 1883, with Francis Napier, 10th Lord Napier, as its chairman, under William Gladstone's Liberal government of the United Kingdom. The Royal Commission had five other members and published its report, the ''Report of Her Majesty's Commissioners of Inquiry Into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland'', in 1884. The other members were: * Sir Donald Cameron of Lochiel, Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Inverness-shire * Sir Kenneth Mackenzie of Gairloch * Charles Fraser-Mackintosh, MP for Inverness Burghs * Alexander Nicolson, Sheriff of Kirkcudbright * Professor Donald MacKinnon, first occupant of the Chair of Celtic, Edinburgh University. ==Historical context== The Commission was a response to crofter and cottar agitation in the Highlands of Scotland. The agitation was about excessively high rents, lack of security of tenure and deprivation of de facto rights of access to land. It took the form of rent strikes (withholding rent payments) and what came to be known as land raids (crofter occupation of land which landlords had given over to sheep farming and to hunting parks called deer forests). ''Crofters' War'' has been used since as a name for this agitation. In the 1870s there had been sporadic short-lived agitations in Wester Ross and Lewis (then both in the county of Ross). In the early 1880s agitation began in Skye (then in the county of Inverness) and there it became persistent and threatened to spread throughout the Hebrides and the Highlands. Police forces attempted to enforce what landlords believed to be their rights, but the police were severely overstretched, especially in Inverness-shire, where William Ivory was Sheriff Principal. Agitation became therefore an issue needing the attention of central government and, eventually, Gladstone's government appointed the Napier Commission. About three years after the Commission's appointment the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act, 1886 would be on the statute book. The Act was not based on the recommendations of the Commission, but the process by which the Commission collected evidence, and the Commission's report, did foster and inform the public, Parliamentary and Cabinet debate which led, eventually to the legislation. The legislation was based on principles accepted in the Irish Land Acts of 1870 and 1881, principles which Napier had implicitly rejected in 1884. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Napier Commission」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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