by Edda Frankot

The medieval magistrates of Aberdeen, like their modern counterparts, were concerned with the accessibility and cleanliness of its roads, with building regulations and with potentially hazardous sites. Unlike the modern city council, however, the medieval government only had a small amount of staff working for it permanently or on an annual basis, such as clerks, sergeants and a bellman. For other tasks adhoc committees or officials were appointed. But there may also have been others doing duties which remain largely invisible in the sources as they have survived, because these duties were not directly relevant to the court, unlike those mentioned above. The only aspects worthy of noting were their appointment and any financial arrangements.

In 1479, for example, the alderman, council and community hired Alexander Coutts to mend the causeways and gutters of the town and to keep all the streets clean so that ‘al men may haf honest and clene passage throuch al the toune’. He would be paid by the people of Aberdeen as follows: all owners of houses with a fireplace (‘fyre house’) would pay him a penny. All other ‘outburgesses’, ‘inburgesses’ (that is to say burgesses living outwith and within the bounds of the town respectively) and ‘indwellers’ (non-burgesses) who had a chamber or a house would also pay a penny, half of them at Martinmass (11 November), the other half at Whitsunday.¹

ACR, 6, pp. 599-600.

An adhoc committee of 9 or 10 ‘of the best of the town’ was to be appointed by the alderman and baillies in 1449 to go round the streets with the ‘gangand assize’² to investigate any ‘purprisioun’ or purpresture, that is to say the ‘illegal enclosure or encroachment upon the land or property of another’, often on public or common land.³ Wherever there was any such encroachment, they were to make note of it and charge whoever was responsible to rectify the problem within forty days.⁴ This exercise resembles a perambulation. The fact that any failure to comply takes place under ‘pain of purprisioune of the king’ also suggests that public property is the focus of the action, which was also the case in perambulations. Different from other known perambulations is the absence of the rest of the population when doing the ambulating and the route followed. This seems to have been a check of encroachments along the streets of Aberdeen’s inner city, rather than along the inner or outer march stones, which were further out.

ACR, 5-1, p. 34.

The assize was also to check whether houses were safe. If any were found to be ‘unsufficient’, the owners would be allowed only eight days to repair them. Otherwise the baillies would come and take down the doors and windows and make the place uninhabitable.⁵ In the case of houses in disrepair, the town magistrates thus took a rather abrupt approach. This may have done wonders in getting those buildings repaired quickly by owners who could afford to get workmen out to do the job. But it would be a disastrous policy for landlords (and/or anyone living in their houses) who could not act so swiftly for whatever reason. There is no further evidence whether such people could receive a deferral if requested.

These three entries show that the town magistrates cared about the cleanliness and safety of Aberdeen’s streets and buildings and organised the maintenance and oversight of it, though based on these three entries it is difficult to say how regular this was. The town government was also concerned about any encroachments on public property and so they organised checks of this. This is a fact already well known from the history of the perambulations, or ‘riding of the marches’, though most of the information we have about this is post-medieval.⁶ As such, these entries form a useful addition to our knowledge of local government in the later Middle Ages.

(* Literal translation of the Dutch expression ‘De beste stuurlui staan aan wal’, which is used to indicate that it is easy to criticise someone doing a job when one is watching from the sidelines.)

by Edda Frankot

ACR, 5, p. 542 (1465)

On the thirteenth of March 1465 three merchants appeared before one of the baillies sitting in the tolbooth. They showed an indenture made between merchants of Aberdeen and Johannes Wolffyne, the master of a bus (a type of cargo or fishing vessel) called the Johannes. This indenture, a charter written in duplicate on the same sheet which was usually separated by cutting along a jagged line, concerned a sea journey. The three men who had appeared in court asked that a specific section of the contract be recorded in the burgh’s ‘common book’ by the court clerk and notary public. This request and the entry as a whole are interesting on a number of levels.

First of all it is interesting linguistically: the entry itself is in Latin, but the quoted words from the contract are in Scots. I would have expected the shipping contract, between Aberdeen merchants and what appears to be a foreign skipper on the basis of his unusual last name, also to have been in Latin. Some examples of similar documents which are recorded in the oldest Sasine Register (see the earlier post about this book) are in Latin. Of course, it is possible that the words were translated specifically for this recording, for the benefit of the merchants perhaps, but that does not make it any less interesting.

Secondly, the entry is informative from a maritime historical and legal perspective: the words specify that the skipper should employ a ‘gud sufficiande sterman’, that is to say a helmsman or pilot, to navigate the coasts of Scotland, England, Flanders, Holland and Zeeland. Apparently the skipper was known not to have these skills himself, which suggests that he was either inexperienced on the whole or on this particular route, or that he had a certain reputation for bad steermanship. The fifteenth century is a time when duties aboard ships became increasingly more specialised, with the skipper evolving into a captain, commanding officers like helmsmen below him rather than navigating the ship himself. But the fact that these words were included specifically, and repeated in the register, does indicate a situation that was not entirely normal. The two shipping contracts that are recorded in the oldest Sasine Register do not include a similar stipulation. They do, however, require sufficient sailors, cables, anchors, fire and water, among other things, to be taken on board.¹

Finally, the entry is interesting within the context of the development of written records. Despite the existence of a contract in duplicate, the three men thought it necessary to show the document before the court and to have some of its words recorded separately in the burgh’s register. This was most likely done as an extra precaution, should both copies be lost and any problems occur on the journey. Again, this suggests that the merchants were not entirely confident of the shipmaster. In the later fifteenth century, this entry would most likely have ended up in the so-called Sasine Register, which appears to have been a type of protocol book, but a similar book was most likely not yet in existence in the 1460s. Notaries public at this time were often also active as burgh clerks, as evidenced by this entry. As a result, the registers often include a mix of actual court cases and matters of voluntary justice, that is to say matters for which we would today use a notary, like this one.

Unfortunately, we do not know whether any problems occurred during the journey to the Low Countries. Johannes Wolffyne does appear elsewhere in the registers, but this is just two days after this entry, when he and his sailors were charged with ‘perturbatio’ (disturbance) against William Menzies and his ‘accomplices’. It appears that the two groups of men had gotten into a fight, as Menzies and his associates were similarly charged. On the 18th of March, all the men were back in court and this time they were all listed (see images below). They were made, by the alderman and council, to ask each other for forgiveness and to take each other by the hand and forgive each other on pain of a fine.² If Wolffyne did come back to Aberdeen after this, his following visits will have been less eventful as he leaves no further trace in the records here.

Transcription ARO-05-0542-04:

xiij^o die mensis Marcij anno Domini et cetera lxiiij^to coram Thoma de Camera uno ballivorum huius burgi protribunale sedente in pretorio eiusdem Dauid filius Mathei Willelmus de Kantle et Alexander de Marr’ comparuerunt et demonstraverunt quandam indenturam factam inter mercatores huius burgi et Johannem Wolffyne magistrum cuiusdam busche vulgaliter nuncupate Johannes penes naulacionem dicte navis sue et in eadem indentura fuit expressatum hec verba sequentia and that the saide maystir sal finde in his schip a gud sufficiande sterman for the costis of Scotlande Inglande Flandris Holande and Selande / et hec verba dicti Dauid Wilelmus et Alexander pecierunt scribi in libro communi per me clericum curie et notarium publicum

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…