December | 2023 | aberdeen registers

Earlier this year the Stair Society published a digital facsimile of the Aberdeen Burgh Court Roll of 1317. These images are available via the Stair Society’s digitised manuscripts page and are reproduced by kind permission of Aberdeen Archives, Gallery and Museums.

This is the single surviving roll from the medieval burgh courts of Aberdeen, and dates from the period August-October 1317. The roll thus predates the later council register volumes, which survive from 1398 onwards. The burgh court roll is on parchment and it represents a unique survival from the courts of a Scottish burgh dating from the early fourteenth century.

A translation of the roll into English, and a discussion of its contents is available in Andrew R. C. Simpson and Jackson W. Armstrong, ‘The Roll of the Burgh Courts of Aberdeen, August-October 1317’, in Miscellany Eight, ed. by A. M. Godfrey, Stair Society 67, (Edinburgh, 2020), 57-93 (see The Roll of the Burgh Courts of Aberdeen, August–October 1317 (stairsociety.org)).

For further discussion of the roll and its context, see Andrew R. C. Simpson, ‘Urban Legal Procedure in Fourteenth Century Scotland: A fresh look at the 1317 court roll of Aberdeen’, in Comparative Perspectives in Scottish and Norwegian Legal History, Trade and Seafaring, ed. by Andrew Simpson and Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde (Edinburgh, 2023), 181–208.

And for a recent overview of this new book see this post by Andrew Simpson on the Edinburgh Private Law Blog.

A link to the burgh court roll at the Stair Society is now featured within aberdeenregisters.org, with a dedicated page and linked in the main menu.

Accounts kept by Provost Andrew Alanson show details of how the burgh’s funds were managed, including expenditures on cultural activities, roadworks and hospitality.

*Aberdeen Accounts 1470–1, held in Beinecke Library, Yale: Osborn Collection, Gordon of Gordonstoun Papers, box II, folder 41.*

Dr Jackson Armstrong consulted the original papers in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale, after chasing a reference to the accounts made by Roderick Lyall in a publication from 1989. Lyall had first identified the papers in the early 1980s. With assistance of archivist Diane Ducharme of the Beinecke, Jackson located the accounts within the Gordon of Gordonstoun Papers, part of the Osborn Collection, gifted to the Library in the 1960s.

*Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut*

The new publication includes a document transcription of the text (almost entirely in Middle Scots), and explores the creation and preservation of the accounts, as well as what they reveal about the process of accounting and auditing in medieval Scotland. The fact that they survive at all seems to be linked to a dispute which arose over who, among the town’s elite, was selected to audit the accounts.

We are fortunate to know a great deal about Andrew Alanson – a provost and man of law – given he has been the subject of another recent study by Prof. Andrew Simpson.

The income received by the provost came primarily from rents of lands (including the ‘freedom lands’), local mills, and salmon fishings on the Dee and Don.

Expenditures ranged widely, but included the provost’s costs to attend parliament; payment to the men that made the scaffolding for the Candlemas play (on 2 February) (16 pence); payment to an unnamed author for the writing of a play (1 merk), which could have been the Candlemas play or perhaps the Corpus Christi play held in June (& for the characters in the annual Candlemas play see ARO-5-0661-04); costs of the town minstrels’ gowns (40 shillings); the upkeep of roads and causeways and bridges (including the Bow Brig over the Denburn); and the maintenance of the tolbooth (including repairs to the town clock, or ‘knok’ in Scots), of the quayside, and of St Nicholas Kirk.

*Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20-alimenti,_vino_rosso,Taccuino_Sanitatis,_Casanatense_4182.jpg*

One of most significant expenses was for hospitality. This included the costs of wine purchased for a meeting of the burgh council in a local tavern on one occasion, but more often gifts of wine to visiting noblemen.

The magnates who were ‘wined and dined’ by the provost included the earl of Huntly (George Gordon, the second earl), the bishop of Aberdeen (Thomas Spens), Lord Erskine (Thomas, second Lord Erskine), Lord Forbes (William, third Lord Forbes), the ‘Lord of Erroll’ (William Hay, third earl of Erroll), and the ‘Lord of Crawford’ (David Lindsay, fifth earl of Crawford). Red wine and sweet Malmsey wine were the favoured refreshments.

The accounts are published in the December 2023 issue of The Scottish Historical Review.

aberdeen registers

The Aberdeen Burgh Records Project

Month: December 2023

Burgh Court Roll of 1317 Digitised & Online

Aberdeen provost’s accounts from 1470s published in The Scottish Historical Review