Both groups lived very similar lives, their crops confined to oats, barley and some rye, and housed in small huts made crudely of clay, turf, wattle and wood which, clustered together, made up a rural township or toun. A toun might hold one, two or three husbandman as the major tenants, and anything between half a dozen and two dozen sub-tenants. Yet both husbandman and cottars were increasingly likely to hold their land on the same terms - a short lease, of no more than five years but as often as not of only one. In 1305 the 'poor husbandman of the King in Scotland' petitioned Edward I of England to redress the precariousness of their tenure 'so that they shall no longer hold their land, as hitherto, from one year to the next'. In practice what this meant was that rents were renegotiated annually, according to the yield of the last harvest. Tied in other ways - obliged to take grain to the lord's mill and subject to his barony court - both husbandmen and cottars were in practice still as dependent on their lord as before. Although not freeholders and thus not a part of the formal feudal system, it was husbandman, still obliged after 1100 as before to render service to the 'common army', who must have made up the bulk of Scottish armies throughout the medieval period.

The hub of rural life everywhere in Scotland was the toun, but there were many variants. South of the Forth and especially in the fertile ground of Lothian, townships were likely to be larger, a parish church was usually at its centre and the lord's hall or castle would not be far away. North of the Forth, by contrast, settlement might be much more dispersed, the touns smaller and the church remote from other human settlement. Although documentary evidence cannot prove its existence in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, it is likely that the more precise distinction of property rights brought about by written charters encouraged a sharper division of land use, into infield (which was intensively cropped and manured) and outfield (where a third to a half of the ground was cropped in any one year, the rest being left as pasture). The steady pressure of a growing population in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries resulted in more intensive use of the land: this could take a number of forms, including the cultivation of waste and marginal sites, the splitting up of existing townships and the formation of new ones. The visible traces of these processes are still there, in the place-names 'Easter' or 'Wester', 'Nether' or 'Upper', or lie half-hidden behind personal names given to the new building mottes which demanded a large supply of low-cost, unskilled labour, but more usually on the land of a neighbouring husbandman or on the demesne of their own or a neighbouring lord. By the fifteenth century when it first explicitly appears in written record (but perhaps as early as the twelfth), the patterns of farming in many townships had conformed to the system of 'runrig', in which rigs or strips of land were circulated systematically, year by year, amongst the tenants and sub-tenants ofa toun. It was a pattern of farming which lasted until the eighteenth century.