Aberdeen Burgh Court Roll – Happy 700th ‘Birthday’

30 November 201701 December 2017 / Jackson Armstrong / Leave a comment

Regular readers of this blog will know that the focus of the Law in the Aberdeen Council Registers project are the eight registers that span the period 1398-1511. Yet the earliest record of council business anywhere in Scotland also resides at the Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives and is known as the Burgh Court Roll. Predating the first surviving Register by some 81 years, it dates from 1317.

17/11/17 City Archivist , Phil Astley (blue shirt) with Lord Provost Barney Crockett and Dr Jackson Armstrong. Courtesy of Aberdeen City Council.

Being great lovers of birthday cake, the project team couldn’t let the roll’s 700^th anniversary go by without a suitable celebration for this nationally important document, so on Monday 20^th November a public talk was held in the Town and County Hall at the Town House in Aberdeen, with City Archivist, Phil Astley introducing fellow project members Dr Jackson Armstrong who provided an overview of the project and Dr Andrew Simpson who spoke about the context and content of the roll itself.

The Burgh Court Roll is a rather unusual looking item, markedly different to the volumes that we are working on. At around 160cm long and 20cm wide, it comprises five panels of parchment that were stitched together when it was created, including a brieve, a letter issued in the name of Robert the Bruce, which has been sewn to the main roll about half way along its length.

At some point in the nineteenth century, a small tube had been fashioned to accommodate the roll and, apart from those occasions when it was removed from the tube to be consulted, it was kept within the tube until 2006. At that time it underwent significant conservation work to repair a number of holes that had appeared over time and to “relax” and flatten it. We know that in the later sixteenth century there were more of these rolls in existence….”evil to be read”. Why has this particular one survived? The town clerk in 1591, one Mr Thomas Molisone, undertook an inventory of the burgh records and found various old books, leaves, and scrolls in a poor state of decay. He appears to have preserved only the surviving Burgh Court Roll as an exemplar from before the time of the first ‘buik’ dating from 1398.

The 1317 Burgh Court Roll covers a number of cases that came before the burgh’s head and bailie courts between August and October of that year. It has recently been translated from Latin to modern English by Andrew Simpson and Jackson Armstrong.

At the November 20^th event, Andrew Simpson concentrated on one of these cases, presenting the narrative through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old Aberdonian woman who features in the first case. The dispute was heard between 1316 and 1317, and the young woman’s name was Ada.

While Ada had been brought up from infancy in Aberdeen, having been born at Martinmas in the year 1299, at some point her family had left the burgh to live in “another part of the kingdom”. But now, following the death of a close relative, Ada returned to her native town, in order to assert her rights of inheritance in a toft (i.e. a piece of land) and a tenement (i.e. a building) in the Gallowgate.

The trouble was that that land was currently held by an influential man, William of Lindsay, Rector of Ayr who had formerly served Robert the Bruce as Chamberlain of Scotland. The Chamberlain was responsible for overseeing the administration of law and order in the burghs, and the collection of customs and taxes due from the burghs to the king. So Ada’s adversary was not only powerful, but also, presumably, well-versed in the laws of the burghs. The case is a complex and fascinating one, shedding light not only on the legal procedures of the time and where these took place, but on how the fall-out from the Wars of Independence had an impact on the lives of individuals living or connected with Aberdeen. William of Lindsay had a claim to the property because he had been granted it by King Robert. But Ada’s claim was through an ancestor who had taken a loan from one Roginald of Buchan, for which they property had been given in security. Roginald had been forfeited by King Robert for his support for the Comyns against the king. King Robert had then granted the property to William of Lindsay. Later, following the victory at Bannockburn, Roginald had sought to return to the king’s peace. A problem thus arose when the king restored to Roginald all his former lands and possessions, including the property in the Gallowgate.

As Dr Simpson showed, ultimately, Ada secured a payment from William of Lindsay in return for transferring the lands to him. Ada declared her wish to do so at three head courts of the burgh. This procedure publicised her intentions, giving her kin ample opportunity to come forward to redeem the lands.

The court held by the bailies then convened in the open air at the site of the property and there Ada gave sasine (formal conveyance of the land) to William by the symbolic measure of presenting him with “hasp and staple” – a “staple” being a metal loop that held in place a “hasp” or catch on which, for example, a door might hang. The bailie received a denarius de uttoll from Ada, and from William a denarius de intoll. The denarius – penny – of intoll was a payment given to the bailie when someone was put into burgh land. Likewise, the penny of uttoll was paid on quitting burgh land.

The story of the seventeen-year-old Ada and her successful attempt to assert her hereditary rights in the Gallowgate somehow captures the imagination. That the Burgh Court Roll can reveal such fascinating glimpses into life in Scotland’s deep past is reason alone to celebrate its 700th year.

Written by Phil Astley, with Jackson Armstrong and Andrew Simpson.

LACR at the Scottish Records Association conference 2017

30 November 2017 / Jackson Armstrong / Leave a comment

SRA 2

On 10 November 2017 members of the project team presented at the Scottish Records Association conference, held at the National Records of Scotland, New Register House, Edinburgh.

The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Putting on the Writs: Scottish Court and Legal Records’.

The day included four sessions, on Civil and Ecclesiastical Courts, Sheriff and Franchise courts, and a plenary. The third session of the day was on the topic of ‘Burgh Records’, and consisted of two papers:

Dr Jackson Armstrong and Dr William Hepburn jointly presented an overview of the project ‘Law in the Aberdeen Council Registers (LACR)’.

Dr Edda Frankot presented a paper on ‘The Records of the Medieval Burgh Courts of Aberdeen’.

Further information can be found at the SRA website:

http://www.scottishrecordsassociation.org/conference

Burgh records, literature and language: a report on The International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature (ICMRSLL), Glasgow, July 2017

06 November 201707 November 2017 / wrhepburn / 2 Comments

By William Hepburn

ICMRSLL 2017 cropped

The ICMRSLL is a long-running conference focussed on Scottish culture in the medieval and early modern period. The centre piece of this iteration, to which delegates repeatedly turned in their discussions, was a plenary debate between Professor Sally Mapstone, representing literary scholarship, and professor Roger Mason, representing historians. Their discussion emphasised that in the scholarship on this period the boundary between their disciplines was blurred. This was underlined by the diversity of the papers given at the conference. Some were particularly relevant to the themes of the LACR project.

For example, in a panel focussing on Dunfermline, Klaus Hoffman and Emily Wingfield came from separate disciplinary directions but together offered a rounded portrait of the Fife burgh’s literate culture. Hoffman, with a background in linguistics and experience working with the town records of Austria and Scotland, offered a paper on the town clerks and scribes of Dunfermline from 1573-1723. His findings were based on a sample of their work extending to 55,000 words. Hoffman was able to identify the hands of town clerks through records of their election, as well as what seem to the hands of their assistants – a role trainee notaries public might occupy as part of their seven years of training. He said these clerks could be understood as a ‘community of practice’ – a network of writers engaged in a joint enterprise and using a shared repertoire. The dates of Hoffman’s study covered the period in which the Scots language became anglicised, and Hoffman’s study revealed Dunfermline to be about 25 years behind central records in terms of anglicisation, which he attributed to the close ties between the local network of Dunfermline clerks. Emily Wingfield’s paper looked at the literary culture of Dunfermline from which the writings of Robert Henryson – thought to have been a notary public – emerged. She argued that there was an extensive literary network centred on Dunfermline, highlighting evidence such as the Miraculae of St Margaret of Scotland, written in Dunfermline in the mid-thirteenth century and surviving in a copy produced in Dunfermline in the reign of James III; the furnishing of Dunfermline Abbey with books by the abbot Richard Bothwell in the mid-fifteenth century; and the connection of the Liber Pluscardensis to a network of notaries.

In another panel looking at Scottish burghs more broadly, Elizabeth Ewan and Rob Falconer offered, respectively, observations on flyting and restorative justice. Ewan said that records of insults in burgh records offer virtually the only evidence of the ordinary speech of ordinary Scots and that in many cases they give us women’s voices. As well as discussing the themes of insults thrown on the streets – such as disease, dishonesty and physical appearance – Ewan explored the relationship between the flyting of the streets and the flying of the literary world, arguing that the former must have influenced the latter, that street flyting could have drawn on literary flyting and that it took formalised and performative qualities. Rob Falconer’s paper argued that criminality was a fundamental part of social relations in burghs. With the metaphor of the body politic in common use, behaviour that damaged this body could be framed as disease or contagion. In this worldview, moral lapses were dangerous if left untreated. Treatment involved ‘curing’ or ‘purging’ the offender. This often took the form of restorative justice, which was about repairing the harm done by the crime and not just punishing the offender. Once this had been done the offender could be accepted back into society, but if the ‘contagion’ represented by such an individual was too severe it had to be purged through, for example, banishment.

My paper was entitled ‘The Common Book: Burgh Registers and Documentary Culture in Fifteenth-Century Aberdeen’. As elsewhere in Scotland, there was a pronounced materiality to the rituals that governed life in medieval Aberdeen, from the transfer of tokens of land ownership to the public shaming of transgressors such as those who had to present the knife with which they had committed an assault to their victims. This materiality was enhanced by the creation of records – objects which preserved the memory of other objects. It made particular sense in towns, where there was usually close proximity between people and property, the sites where business concerning them was transacted and the places where the written records of them were stored. A burgh archive which gathered together many records such could function as a symbol of the burgh community whatever the format in which it preserved documents, but by shrinking thousands of enactments of this relationship into a portable, easily-searchable artefact, it had particular power. The materiality of these artefacts – burgh registers, often called common books by contemporaries – may have increased the value placed in writing itself. Even those who could not read or write could have seen their power as symbols of the burgh community. Perspectives may have been shifted simply by the awareness that the burgh government had the memory of the town stored in physical form, in much the same the way as Brian Stock outlined when he argued that texts did not have to be present for people to think or behave as if they were. ¹

My paper pointed towards administrative practices in burghs as one factor contributing towards the increasing use of the written word in late medieval Scotland. The other papers I have highlighted also pointed towards the significance of burghs and their records to Scottish language and literature as, for instance, centres of literary networks or inspiration for poetic flytings. The work of the Law in the Aberdeen Council Registers project will help to make the richest source from burghs in this period more accessible to scholars, offering the potential for new insights on the language and literature of late medieval Scotland amongst many other subjects.

See for instance Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Thanks to Anne Rutten of the University of St Andrews, who presented on the consolidation of Stewart power through texts in the reigns of Robert II and III on the same panel as me at the ICMRSLL in Glasgow, for first directing me to the work of Stock. ↩

An encounter with the Dubrovnik council registers

13 October 2017 / aberdeenregisters / Leave a comment

by Edda Frankot

The Aberdeen Council Registers are unique survivals within a Scottish context: Aberdeen is the only burgh for which a nearly complete set of such books for the fifteenth century is extant. But within a European context Aberdeen is far from unique: many town archives in Europe have collections of medieval records, some of them much larger and stretching back into the fourteenth or even the thirteenth century. They provide important potential comparative material for the Aberdeen registers. In the context of my PhD research and focussing specifically on cases of maritime law, I had already looked at very similar material from the towns of Kampen (Netherlands), Lübeck (Germany), Danzig/Gdańsk (Poland) and Reval/Tallinn (Estonia). Very recently, I had the privilege to be introduced to another set of urban registers: the Reformationes and the Acta Consiliorum of Dubrovnik in Croatia.

Some of the Reformationes and Acta Consiliorum from Dubrovnik.

I was in Dubrovnik from 20 to 22 September to attend the ‘Mapping Urban Changes’ conference in the context of a proof-of-concept project which I am co-leading with Dr Adelyn Wilson from the School of Law called ‘Spaces of Power in Interregnum Aberdeen’. This sister project of LACR is funded by RIISS under a research development grant. It seeks to visualise the use of the physical space within the burghs of Old and New Aberdeen for the exercise of political, religious, mercantile and administrative power. In addition to presenting this project, I was at the conference to learn about relevant other projects and useful techniques and methodologies. In this respect the conference was very fruitful.

Visiting Dubrovnik also provided the opportunity to learn more about the Du:cac project, which has just been completed. This project, led by Dr Ana Plosnić Ŝkarić of Zagreb University, aimed to transcribe all relevant entries or deliberations from the period 1400-1450 concerning the spaces and buildings within the walls of Dubrovnik and link these to a searchable map. The Du:cac website includes a custom-made map with clickable points, indicating actual buildings, spaces near them (in those cases where a house is said to be near a church, for example), streets and neighbourhoods. These link to relevant transcriptions. The transcriptions will also be published as an e-book.

A screenshot from the Du:cac website, showing a map segment with clickable points.

The government of Dubrovnik was made up somewhat differently to that of Aberdeen. The city had three councils: the Major Council, the Minor and the Senate. Up until 1415 the deliberations of all three councils were kept in the same book, called Reformationes (these were begun in the late thirteenth century). From 1415, they were divided up into three registers. From the years between 1400 and 1450 there survive three volumes of Reformationes, nine volumes of Acta Consilii Maioris, twelve volumes of Acta Minoris Consilii and eleven volumes of Acta Consilii Rogatorum, comprising a total of 15,944 pages (the Aberdeen Council Registers from 1398-1511 comprise 5239 pages). The volumes are almost completely in Latin, with occasional words in Croat and some entries in Italian, which was used as a lingua franca in the Adriatic region, as Ana Plosnić explained to me. Latin was used in these registers until the end of the Dubrovnik republic in the late eighteenth century.

The Sponza Palace

Just before I had to catch a plane back to Aberdeen via Paris and had to leave the beautiful city (and weather) behind, there was an opportunity to visit the archives which are in the Sponza Palace, one of the few buildings which survived the 1667 earthquake in Dubrovnik unscathed. There, Ana Plosnić kindly showed me some of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century registers. The page layout of these look very similar to those of the Aberdeen books: with marginal headings and clearly recognizable entries. The Acta Consiliorum also include deliberations on elections, which provide interesting comparative material for the entries recently uncovered in Newburgh’s registers by LACR’s William Hepburn (see the post on his visiting scholarship at St Andrews University Library Special Collections). In Dubrovnik votes could be cast not only in favour of candidates, but also against them, and relatives were excluded from voting for a specific person (indicated as ex. or extra).

IMG_20170922_121503583

All in all, this encounter with the Dubrovnik material once again stresses the importance of considering the Aberdeen registers in a European context.

Special section published in Urban History: “Communities, courts and Scottish towns”

23 August 201724 August 2017 / Jackson Armstrong / Leave a comment

This month sees the publication in Urban History (Volume 44 – Issue 3 – August 2017) of a special section entitled ‘Communities, courts and Scottish towns’. Co-edited by Andrew Mackillop and Jackson W. Armstrong, it features the following articles:

Jackson W. Armstrong and Andrew Mackillop, ‘Introduction: communities, courts and Scottish towns’. The section editors set the stage for three essays which examine changing features of pre-modern political society between the fifteenth century and the early nineteenth century, and the construction and sometimes contested use of vocabularies of law and authority, privileges and liberties, and ideas of urban ‘community’.

Claire Hawes, ‘The urban community in fifteenth-century Scotland: language, law and political practice’. This article seeks to provoke discussion of the political culture of Scotland’s late medieval towns through an analysis of communitarian language and its use by urban elites. Hawes argues that the Scottish urban community, as elsewhere, could be positioned as a location, a legal construct and a group of people. This provided the burgh council with a variety of political tools which could be employed – consciously or otherwise – in order to legitimize its authority.

Bob Harris, ‘Scots burghs, ‘privilege’ and the Court of Session in the eighteenth century’. This piece explores the propensity of Scottish burghs to resort to legal redress in Scotland’s leading civil court. Harris traces what this can tell us both about urban identity and the constitution of urban community in this period, and he opens up an examination of the role which the law may have played in the re-constitution and re-shaping of urban community.

Andrew Mackillop, ‘Riots and reform: burgh authority, the languages of civic reform and the Aberdeen riot of 1785′. This article explores the understudied riots which occurred in Aberdeen in mid-October 1785. Mackillop charts the climate of politicization that characterized the burgh’s civic life in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution and before the outbreak of the equivalent process in France.

The special section arises as part of the wider Aberdeen Burgh Records Project in RIISS (https://www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/about/aberdeen-burgh-records-project-97.php), and we are delighted to see these articles feature in Urban History.

The articles and further information may be found at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/urban-history

Manslaughter in 1480s Aberdeen: notes from another fifteenth-century register

31 July 201731 July 2017 / aberdeenregisters / 1 Comment

by Edda Frankot

The Aberdeen Council Registers are not the only extant registers from fifteenth-century Aberdeen. Another large volume known as the Sasine Register no. 1 has survived since the late fifteenth century, covering the period from June 1484 to January 1502 and totalling just over a 1000 pages.

Its title, Sasine Register, referring to legal procedures whereby a person received formal possession of lands or property, had many years ago put me off using (or even looking at) the book for my PhD on the practice of maritime law. A recent introduction to the manuscript in the context of another project highlighted what a mistake this was: the register is much more a miscellaneous legal register. The title is a later addition. The fact that few other scholars have used the manuscript (and its companions from the early sixteenth century) suggests that I am not the only one who was put off by its title. Though perhaps the manuscript’s unappealing handwriting and the fact that it is almost wholly in Latin do not help either.

Be that as it may, it turned out that the book contains many entries concerning property, but also rather a lot of other very interesting material. A more thorough analysis is still required, but it may be that in June 1484 the town clerks decided to record some of the town’s court business in a separate register. For example, the ‘sasine register’ includes certain matters which were dealt with by only one or two officials and these no longer appear in the council registers. What is most noticeable when leafing through the ‘sasine register’ is its language. Whereas increasingly more Scots was used in the council registers in the second half of the fifteenth century, very few entries in Scots can be found in this book. It is possible that we will see a sharp drop in the use of Latin in the council registers around June 1484 because some of the business recorded in Latin was transferred to this other register. So far we have completed transcription of volumes 5 and 7 (and there appears to be a marked difference in the use of Latin between the two, as concluded by the LACR project’s own Anna Havinga) but have not yet reached 1484 in volume 6. It may also be that there was an increase in business in both Latin and Scots in the mid 1480s. Though we have yet to research this in detail, it is likely that Latin was used more for cases in which formulaic language could be used, that is to say anything that followed a standard format that had been used for years. Examples of this are sasines, the recovery of burghal tenements, inheritance cases (inquisitions post mortem), admissions of burgesses, nominations of procurators etc. This is not to say that all such cases would have been moved to the ‘sasine register’, as some needed to be conducted at specific courts. The recovery of burghal tenements, for example, had to be conducted at four head courts and would be recorded in the council registers. But certain business that could be administered quickly by a smaller number of officials may well have ended up in the other book.

In addition to such cases, there are copies of shipping contracts between skippers and merchants and many other notarial acts, but also fragments of poems and a recipe for a medicine for ‘stanes’ (gall or kidney stones). There are also, quite unexpectedly, entries from the sheriff court. These sheriff court entries will be among the oldest extant in Scotland. Of course, Aberdeenshire can already boast the oldest extant sheriff court book in Scotland (1503-1511)¹, but even William Croft Dickinson, possibly the most knowledgeable on Aberdeen and its courts and the editor of the Fife Sheriff Court Book appears to have been unaware of the existence of fifteenth-century sheriff court cases from Aberdeen.

The interrogation of Andrew Murray senior

The oldest sheriff court entry in the ‘sasine register’ concerns the interrogation of Andrew Murray senior by John Cheyne before Alexander Irvyne, sheriff depute of Aberdeen, as part of the examination into the spoiling of grass or turf in the parish of Ellon.² Later entries indicate that more serious crimes were also investigated and tried before the Aberdeen sheriff court, as was to be expected. On the 10th of January 1486 Alexander Irvyne was in court to prosecute the killer of Andrew Kelor, but no one compeared (appeared).³ Proceedings on 9 June 1487 were more successful when the killer was known, though the entry confuses killer and killed as both were called Robert. In this case Robert Blindsele was sitting as deputy sheriff.⁴ Robert Black appeared in court with a letter of remission (forgiveness of wrongdoing) from the king concerning his killing of Robert Frostar and declared himself prepared to pay Frostar’s parents or nearest heirs compensation for his death, which no one objected to.⁵

The case of the two Roberts

Though it appears that some of the sheriff court proceedings were held in the tolbooth, like the vast majority of the burgh courts, others appear to have taken place outside, at the mercat cross (‘Ad forum crucis’ in the second line of the image above). It is unclear whether this was a regular occurrence, but at least two of the courts recorded in the sasine register were held there. It should be noted, though, that both were in June. According to Croft Dickinson the sheriff courts in the head burghs of the shire were normally held in the tolbooth. But before the sixteenth century not all courts were held in the head burghs. Elsewhere in the shire people would gather at well-known landmarks, such as churches, or standing stones.⁶ Croft Dickinson did note a few examples of burgh courts being held at mercat crosses, but these were quite exceptional.⁷

All in all, the oldest ‘sasine register’ has proven to be another important treasure held by the Aberdeen archives and in recognition of this the manuscript was recently digitally photographed by the National Records of Scotland. But for now, its investigation lies in the hands of those willing to read through its pages one by one…

‘Illustrative examples’ of this were published in Records of the Sheriff Court of Aberdeenshire, Volume I. Records prior to 1600, ed. David Littlejohn (Aberdeen 1908). ↩
ACAA, SR, 1, p. 37, 12 Apr 1485. ↩
ACAA, SR, 1, p. 46. ↩
On 30 June yet another deputy presided: John Collison. Both Collison and Blindsele would have been Aberdeen burgesses, whereas Irvyne was also laird of Drum. ACAA, SA, 1, p. 81. ↩
ACAA, SR, 1, p. 79. ↩
Fife Sheriff Court Book, ed. William Croft Dickinson (Edinburgh 1928), xviii-xix. ↩
He notes an example from Haddington in 1391 and from Banff in 1549 and 1551. Early Records of Aberdeen, 1317, 1398-1407, ed. William Croft Dickinson (Edinburgh 1957), cxxiv, n. 7. ↩

‘brokin folkis’ (1499)

13 July 2017 / wrhepburn / 1 Comment

By William Hepburn

'Brokin folkis' blog image

On 22 March 1499, Gilbert Litstar – a dyer – made a statement to the alderman and baillies of Aberdeen about dyed cloth in his possession which belonged to residents of the burgh and people from the country. He said that there were ‘certane brokin folkis’ watching in the night. According to the Dictionary of the Scots Language, ‘brokin’, when applied to people, meant being in an impoverished condition and living lawlessly as a consequence. More specifically, it often referred to ‘those having no proper feudal superior or chief, and living by violence and robbery’. The exact status of the ‘brokin folkis’ mentioned here is unclear but Gilbert Litstar clearly saw them as a great danger. He stated to the alderman and baillies that he and others stood on their feet watching over the goods by night. To avoid damage to the goods he asked Maunys the bellman to pass through the town and summon both dwellers of the town and the country who had goods to collect from Gilbert to come and get them within 24 hours. If they did not, stipulated Gilbert, and the goods were stolen or damaged, it would not be his responsibility.

This entry raises a number of interesting questions. How many clients did Gilbert Litstar have, and who were they? Why did he think that having the handbell rung through the town was a sufficient measure to warn both residents of the town as well as people in the country? Where was Gilbert Litstar keeping the goods, and why were they vulnerable? Who were the ‘brokin folkis’?

Transcription:

ACR, 7, p. 942, 22 March 1499

The saide day comperit Gilbert Litstar befor the aldirman and ballieis and exponit oppinlie and declarit how he hed certane littit clath pertening to induellaris of this burghe and to landmen and part of weddis and gagis Ande thar war certane brokin folkis wachand in the nicht and he and his folkis nychtlie stude one thar feit kepand the said gudis and for the eschevin of skathis he causit maunys bellman to pas throw the haill tone and be his handbell opinlie warnit and chargit ale and sindrie personis bath to burghe and land that hed ony clath or weddis with the sad gilbert to cum furthtwith and rede thar’ said clathis and weddis within xxiiij houris and protestand solemptlie gyf thai come nocht and the said clath or weddis happinnis as god forbad to be stollin or skatht that he be quyt and skathles tharof in tym to cum befor thir witnes sere Jhon Ruthirfurd aldirman Androw Cullan Richard Waus balyeis Johne Mar Patrik Andirsone James Colison Duncan Colison Johne Duncansone Philp Dumbrek.

(Some punctuation added and spelling modernised for readability.)

Plague and Quarantine in Aberdeen, 1499

01 June 201712 June 2017 / wrhepburn / Leave a comment

By William Hepburn

Quarantine blog post image

This entry, from 21 June 1499, is one of several from the Aberdeen Council Registers concerning plague. It gives us clues about the town’s response to the disease. Part of this response was to set up two lines of quarantine around the town. The first was the physical boundary of the town. Aberdeen did not have an encircling city wall, so its physical boundary was made up by the town gates and the back walls of properties. This physical boundary on its own was apparently not enough to enforce a line of quarantine around the town, because people were able to jump or climb over the walls and gates. Further measures were put in place, including the employment of guards to watch the town at night and the offer of a reward to anyone who reported someone climbing or jumping the boundary. ¹

The second line of quarantine covered the town’s hinterland. The entry states that no people or goods were allowed into the town from outside of a prescribed area surrounding it unless it could be proven that they were uninfected and came from an uninfected place. The entry appears to define that area as stretching from the river Dee on the southern edge of Aberdeen, out to St Ternan’s (modern-day Banchory) in the west, and from there up through Monymusk to Strathbogie (modern-day Huntly or, more broadly, the area around the river Strathbogie). The area was enclosed to the north by a line apparently set somewhere between there and Old Aberdeen to the north of Aberdeen.

In her 2001 thesis on plague in early modern Aberdeen, Karen Jillings argued that before 1514 the town largely escaped the plague.² Measures such as the ones described in this entry may have helped to keep the plague out.

Transcription:

ACR, 7, p. 963-4, 21 June 1499

Statuta pro Custodia burgi

The saide day It was statut ordanit ande finalie concludit be the aldirman balyeis consale ande communite of this burghe opinlie warnit be the hande bell and officiaris throw the haill tone that nay manere of persone wittalis nor uthir stuf beyonde and one the southt part of the wattir of dee cum within this burghe without sufficient certificacion that thai ar clene and cumin fra clene placis. Item that nay persone off nay degre bevne Sanct Ternanys Monymusk Srabogy nor northt part wart fra ald Abirdene cum within this burghe and that the said personis cum nocht within the tone withoutin sufficient certificacion that thai ar cumin fra clen placis and that thai ar clene. Item that xxiiij personis circualy requerit and warnit personaly pas ilkan nycht to the waching of the tone and that ilke man pas for him self undir the panys of banysing. And that nane Induellar of this towne pas uteuthe to faris. Ande that nay tymmir cum within the tone. And that nane leip dikis portis nor cum in atour ony uthir place the portis vndir the pane of bannysin the tone and quhay findis ony persone lepand ony port or bak dik and schevis to the aldirman the name of the persone he sal haue v s’ to his revarde and that nay tymmir cum within this burghe.

In a recent blog post Edda Frankot highlighted another reward for preventing infection from entering the town. In 1456-7 a man named Alexander Logy was made a burgess as reward a reward for preventing infected people from entering the town at the Green. ↩
Karen Jillings, ‘For the safte and preservatioun of the toun’: Plague and the Poor in Early Modern Aberdeen (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2002). ↩

Heroes, hangmen, minstrels and more: the admission of burgesses in medieval Aberdeen

12 May 201715 May 2017 / aberdeenregisters / 1 Comment

by Edda Frankot

In the fifteenth century, new burgesses and guild brothers were admitted to the town every year. Lists of these admissions are regularly included in the Aberdeen Council Registers. A particularly good source is the Guild Court Book (ACR, volume 5-2), but lists are also included in the other volumes. The majority of the entries on these lists are for men that were admitted as both burgesses and guild brothers, but others only became burgesses. Most of the men were sons of burgesses. Another group that gained automatic entry, on payment of a fee, were those who married the daughter of a burgess. The entries of these two groups are normally very formulaic and provide little additional information beyond names and a payment.

The heading of the list of new burgesses and guild brothers from the time of provost John of Fife (1452-53)

But the entries concerning non-standard admissions can provide a lot of interesting detail on a great variety of subjects. A significant number of people were admitted ‘at instanciam’, at the insistence, of specific individuals or groups of people. Often these are local nobles, higher clergy or royal officials. In 1446-47, for example, John Matheson was admitted at the insistence of John of Mar and the Lords Gordon and Forbes. In the same year John Bullock was made a burgess and guild brother at the request of the bishop of Ross and various burgesses. In 1452 the council decided to only allow admissions of burgesses’ sons and sons-in-law for the coming year. This was either to limit the number of burgesses and guild members, or to restrict the influence of outsiders on the town. But in the admission list that follows we nonetheless find three men that were admitted at the insistence of outsiders: one after a request by the comptroller of the king’s rolls, one by Lord Crichton, the chancellor, and one by the countess of Huntly. So it appears that it was hard for the magistrates to resist such requests.¹

The admission of John Matheson

Especially fascinating are the entries that give a specific reason for the admission, or a condition. Occasionally, men were admitted as a reward for services rendered to the town, or at the request of an existing burgess who had done a good deed. In the list of 1444-45 Thomas Rutherfurd was admitted because of his role in ending the discord between Thomas and John Voket. According to the 1456-57 list Alexander Logy was admitted at the request of Patrick Piot because the latter had prevented infirm or infected outsiders from entering the town at the Green. Thomas Johnson was made a burgess and guild brother in 1498-99 because of his labours around the capturing of the killer or killers of Agnes Burges in the night. The threat of an English invasion caused the council to admit Andrew Chapman living in Loirston, in 1454-55, on the condition that he would keep a fire lit all night at the Loirston cairn and during the day would keep a watch for English enemies with two others. Men with useful professions were occasionally admitted for free: in 1451-52 a barber, a Frenchman, in 1454-55 a ‘medicus’, in 1456-57 a ‘mimus’, an actor or mime, and in 1487-88 a ‘carnifex’ were entered. The latter may have been a butcher, but because his admission specifically says ‘racione sue artis’: because of his skill or craft, perhaps we can assume he was an executioner. Apart from the doctor, these men were only admitted as burgesses, not as guild brothers.²

The admission of Thomas Johnson

The fees that were paid by most of the men to be admitted could also be used for specific purposes indicated in the records. The fee paid by William Maitland, a carpenter admitted as a burgess in 1455-56 was given to Patrick Wrych ‘pro elimosina’: as alms. The year before, part of the fee paid by Alexander Chalmers would go towards the repair of the ‘key’, which is not specified further. Obviously it was clear to everyone at the time which key was meant. In 1455 the council decided that Donald of Fife, who was at that time a captive in England, could put forward a suggestion for a new burgess and guild brother ‘for his relief and ransoming’. Presumably the fee paid by this person would be used towards the payment of the ransom.³

The admission of Alexander Chalmers

Overall, the lists of admission provide a wealth of details for anyone with the patience to seek out the gems that are hidden within them.

ACR, 5-2, p. 717, p. 716; p. 769; p. 773. ↩
ACR, 5-2, p. 695; p. 798; ACR, 7, p. 913; ACR, 5-2, 785; ACR, 5-2, pp. 658, 695, 798; ACR, 7, 40. ↩
ACR, 5-2, p. 784; p. 785; p. 782. ↩

Forbidden beasts and where to keep them

26 April 201727 April 2017 / wrhepburn / Leave a comment

By William Hepburn

Forbidden Beasts ACR entry for blog post

Late medieval towns were distinct from the countryside around them because of their special legal status and their concentration of buildings. But all Scottish medieval towns were small by modern standards and late medieval records frequently remind us how blurred the boundary was between urban and rural life.

Nothing better represents this blurred boundary than the livestock kept in and around towns, which were frequently the subject of urban legislation. Aberdeen, for instance, seems to have had recurring problems with pigs roaming free around the town. These animals were referred to as ‘forboddin bestis’. In June 1465 it was ordained that the baillies would choose four men to capture any pigs causing trouble to people or running loose on the streets. These pig catchers either had to take their porcine prisoners to the master of the ‘kirk werk’ – the official in charge of building work at St Nicholas Kirk, the parish church – for a reward of 6 d. for each pig. Alternatively, they could kill the pigs where they found them and take the carcasses as rewards.

In October 1495 a similar ordinance was issued. It stated that no pigs were to be loose in the town, giving a fifteen-day deadline for pigs to be put in enclosures or removed from the town. For any pigs found loose after this point the owners would have to pay a fine of 8 shillings to the court and the pig would be confiscated from them.

Another royal burgh on the east coast of Scotland – Montrose – issued a flurry of similar legislation in 1459 and 1460.¹ It was set down in April 1459 that there would be a fine of 4 d. for each time a pig was found loose and, in October of the same year, that no one was to keep pigs in the town and if they did the pigs would be confiscated. In May 1460 it was also stated that anyone who suffered damage from a loose pig was to bring it before the alderman or bailles and half of the value of it would go to them and the other half to the common use of the town. One entry also lists a fine to be paid for disobeying swine keepers – presumably officials charged with making sure that people kept their pigs under control.

Pigs were not the only livestock to be found in and around towns. A record of a court case from Aberdeen in 1499 shows that Janet Clat and Jock Lammyntone were convicted of breaking down Andrew Gall’s door and taking sheep from his house. In Newburgh, Fife, in 1463 the baillie Thom Rogerson made an accusation that sheep kept by other townspeople were eating crops.² In Montrose in 1462 keepers of the links were appointed to keep livestock out of the area – sheeps, pigs and oxen – and fines for animals found there were listed. Another entry from 1462 shows that Montrose had a common shepherd.

Animals, then, were a recurring theme of fifteenth-century urban legislation and the damage they might cause to property – and perhaps also to public health – was clearly regarded as far from trivial. These records leave us with the impression that medieval Scottish towns were, in some ways, much like farmyards.

Transcriptions from Aberdeen Council Registers (ACR)

ACR, 5, p. 549, 24 June 1465

Item the chawmerlane has ordanyt the four bailyeis to cheis four men to tak all swyne that thai fande lows utow bande in ony mannis scathe or gangande on the gate and present thaim to the maystir of the kirk werke. And thai sal hafe for thair travaile of ilke swyne vj d’ or ellis sla thaim quhar thai finde thaim lous’ and tak the bodijs til eschete to thaim that slays thaim for thai ar forboddin bestis

ACR, 7, p. 670, 9 October 1495

The saide day it was statut ande ordanit be the consale that nay swyne salbe haldin within the burgh uteuth’ bande ande within fiftene dais to be removit the burgh or in bande. Ande the Joysaris of the saide swyne to pay viij s’ for the amerciament of the court and the saide swyne to be eschet and thaj be comprehendit uteuthe bande the saide fiftene dais beinge runnyn thaj beand fundin in ony mannis skath

ACR, 7, p. 953, 6 May 1499

The samyn day Jonet Clat was convikit be ane suorne assis Alexander Red forspekar for the wranguys away takin of certane scheip out of Androu Gallis hous and for the brekin of his dur for the quhilkis scho was in ane amerciament of the court and to amend as law wil and to forber in tyme to cum. Ande Jok Lammytone was convikit be the saide assis, the saide alexander Rede forspekar, for the wranguis takin of certan schep out of the saide hous and brekin of the sad dur as saide is et cetera

The saide day Jonet Clat and Jok Lammyntone was convikit tbe the saide assis Alexander Rede forspekar for the away takin of Certan Schep fra Androw Gall this day takin in his corne for the quhilkis thai war in ane amerciament of the court et cetera

All Montrose references from Montrose Burgh Court Book 1455-1467, National Records of Scotland, B51/10/1. ↩
Newburgh Burgh Court Book 1457-1479, University of St Andrews Special Collections, B54/7/1. ↩