On 14 March Jackson Armstrong gave a paper entitled “All thingis covntit”: Government and Accounting in Fifteenth-Century Burghs.
This was for a joint meeting of the Scottish History Seminar and Medieval History Research Seminar at the University of Edinburgh, coordinated by Dr Alasdair Raffe and Dr Emily Ward.
The presentation explored different types of accounts created in medieval burghs, and what those involved in governing towns thought they were doing when they drew them up and subjected them to audit. The paper represents work underway arising from the FLAG project, and there was a rich discussion afterwards about the nature of account-keeping in medieval and early modern Scotland. It was a valuable opportunity to examine these topics, and also for Jackson to catch up with colleagues and some former students!
On 29 November Dr William Hepburn gave a paper to the Aberdeen History seminar.
While it is well known that the Aberdeen Council Registers document the social and economic life of the burgh especially through the lens of legal activities, William Hepburn’s paper argued that these records of everyday administration also represent an expression of the town’s political culture. They capture the ideals and practices that were reinforced time and again by the governing elite over many decades.
Writers such as William Dunbar addressed themes of the moral and religious context of late medieval government
Demonstrating some of the language analysis undertaken in the FLAG project (AHRC-DFG, 2020-2023), he argued that what emerges is a political culture underpinned by the notion of balanced and fair accounting, stemming from the burgh’s foundational transaction and the myriad transactions which remained its raison d’etre, especially for those at the heart of government: the burgesses themselves. The idea of the burgh as an upholder of fair and balanced transactions expressed through a language of order, and of community, in fact served to justify an oligarchic and near-hereditary regime.
This paper closed by indicating some new directions for expanding research questions to address other Scottish burghs records.
MSc students at Aberdeen have developed a new search platform, experimenting with different search functions and displays
Team Delta members with Jackson Armstrong
“Team Delta”, one of the student groups tasked to carry out a client-focused project as part of the MSc Information Technology course, worked with the Aberdeen Burgh Records Project and the Aberdeen City Archives in winter-spring 2023. The group members were Samuel Lawal, Zixiang Tang, Shahbaaz Hussain, Emmanuel Boamah, Yan Zhang, and Layek Ahmad.
The challenge for the team was to develop a search platform based in an application other than Ruby on Rails, and to develop search facilities that would assist researchers with identifying occurrences of personal names, and with identifying numbers of entries of courts of different types. Team Delta built the new search tool in Python and Django.
The new platform is called ‘Enhanced Search 1.0 for ARO’, and it is linked from here.
During the second semester, the team met regularly with Jackson Armstrong who represented the Aberdeen Burgh Records Project as the client. The challenge to create a way to search for courts proved to be the most successful element of the exercise: the courts heading division in the ARO XML corpus is searched specifically for particular strings of text, and the new tool then counts up entries following each heading which is returned in the result, as in the example below. This is a useful way for researchers to quantify how ‘busy’ different types of courts were, with the number of entries representing the cases heard after each heading in the registers.
The challenge to search for names, or groups of names (such as those in the ‘Working List of Provosts, Bailies and Sergeands’) proved more difficult, and the resulting name search facility functions as a keyword search across the whole ARO corpus. This is powerful but non-specific. For both new search facilities, ‘Enhanced Search 1.0 for ARO’ includes a graph feature which displays results visually, as number of occurrences by year. The example below shows occurrences for the search term ‘james’:
‘Enhanced Search 1.0 for ARO’ is available via ARO Resources and Publications linked from the ARO website. It is hosted for the time being on pythonanywhere.com.
One highlight of the project was Team Delta’s visit to the Charter Room at the Aberdeen City Archives to see the original council register volumes, to meet with City Archivist Phil Astley, and to demonstrate the new search tool.
The new trail blazed by Team Delta with ‘Enhanced Search 1.0’ is a great pathway for future development of new versions and features of the tool, and new ways for the ARO to be searched and presented.
The Aberdeen Burgh Records Project thanks all of Team Delta, and Bruce Scharlau who coordinated the MSc IT project course.
Herbst/Winter (Oktober–Dezember), showing Augsburg Perlachplatz, by Heinrich Vogtherr the Younger (c. 1550). The Town Hall is on the right. See commons.wikimedia.org . Original painting in DHM, Berlin.
On 20 February the Burgh Records Project was pleased to welcome Prof. Dr Jörg Rogge (JGU Mainz), to Aberdeen, to give a paper on “The town hall of medieval Augsburg – a material expression of communal self-concept”.
Jörg’s paper explored the administrative functions of the Town House (Rathaus), its upkeep and renovation (works detailed in the BMB Baumeisterbücher), and the symbolic aspects of the building.
He addressed the medieval Town House as – foremost – a functional space. As a secure building it was the place where the council met, where peace-breakers were imprisoned, where taxes were paid until the 1470s and where financial officials, including the Baumeister, conducted their transactions (in a dedicated chamber known as the Baumeisterstube), and stored their records. It was the focal point in Augsburg for demonstration of a consensus between the governing council and wider civic community of burghers, and the Town Hall itself expressed the idea of a ‘cooperative community’.
All the same, Jörg argued, such a consensus came to be replaced by a less participatory civic culture in the decades from the 1470s-1490s, and onwards. In this regard the paper examined how the same building came to be more exclusively focused on the urban elite, asserting their position as rulers of the city and exercising their collective power in way that adopted the forms used by the nobility.
The elaborate model of the medieval townhouse pictured above is in the Maximilian Museum in Augsburg. It was made by craftsmen in the early seventeenth century, when the medieval building was demolished to make way for the new construction designed by Elias Holl, in 1615, which survives today.
Jörg remained in Aberdeen for the week and collaborated in person in FLAG-related writing projects, and managed to catch a Dons match.
Mainz: The Old Cathedral (foreground) and St Martin’s Cathedral
Late medieval urban government was under discussion through the main project themes of ‘order’, ‘budget’ and ‘unity’.
On 6 and 7 October FLAG hosted its second international workshop, a gathering in person at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. The main purpose of the workshop was for the project team to share working drafts of publications, and to hear insights and input from a panel of commentators and round-table participants. Following the event a group of FLAG team members visited Augsburg – long overdue as we had originally hoped a team meeting there would have been a first gathering back in 2020!
Workshop underway in Mainz
The papers presented in advance for discussion addressed FLAG’s examination of urbanitas as a focus for comparison between Augsburg and Aberdeen, and explored the digital methods we are using. The discussions around the papers highlighted the importance of bringing Scottish and German historiography into new dialogue, which is also one of the goals of FLAG.
On the morning of the 6th we were treated to a guided tour by excavation director Dr. Guido Faccani of Mainz’s ‘Old Cathedral’ (today’s Lutheran Johanniskirche). This is the only cathedral building originating in the early middle ages in Germany, and it is the predecessor building of the Romanesque cathedral of St Martin.
Dr. Faccani leads the tour
On 6 October the programme included the following sessions:
Welcome and introduction – Professor Jörg Rogge and Dr. Jackson Armstrong
Dr. Regina Schäfer: On administrative structures and terminology in Augsburg (1368 to 1466). Commentators: Dr. Mathias Kluge, Augsburg; Dr. Dominique Adrian, Nancy.
Dr. William Hepburn: Compt, rekning and payment: The Economic Ideal of Urban Government in Late Medieval Aberdeen. Commentators: Dr. Eliza Hartrich, University of East Anglia; Professor Graeme Small, Durham.
Dr. Wim Peters & Dr. William Hepburn: Evaluation of digitised sources – digital hermeneutics. Commentators: Professor Jessica Nowak, Leipzig/Mainz; Dr. Benjamin Hitz, Basel.
Above: Images of Augsburg Cathedral (L), effigy of Abbot Heinrich Friess (d.1482), in the Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra (C), and the Perlachturm (R)
On 7 October the programme included the following sessions:
Professor Jörg Rogge & Dr. Jackson Armstrong: Urbanitas – Augsburg and Aberdeen in Comparison. Commentators: Prof. Gabriel Zeilinger, Erlangen-Nürnberg; Dr. Alan MacDonald, Dundee.
Roundtable: Professor Michael Brown, St. Andrews; Professor Edda Frankot, Universität Nord; Professor Jelle Haemers, Leuven; Professor Steffen Krieb, Akademie der Wissenschaften in Mainz.
On 8 and 9 October members of the FLAG team visited Augsburg, and included a visit to the Maximilian Museum which holds the fifteenth-century archive chest, and early modern wooden models of the medieval town house.
Jörg Rogge, Regina Schäfer, and William Hepburn with the archive chest of 1470 from the Augsburg town house, in the Maximilian Museum.
Above: detailed images of the model of the medieval town house of Augsburg, in the Maximilian Museum.
‘Order’, ‘budget’ and ‘unity’ were among the themes explored in the first FLAG workshop on the topic of New perspectives on civic administration in fifteenth-century towns.
In-person workshop participants meet together and online
On 5 and 6 November FLAG hosted its first international workshop, a ‘hybrid’ in-person and online gathering in Aberdeen. This brought the project team together, alongside participants invited to share perspectives from their own work.
Some early arrivals in Scotland visit Dunottar Castle
The FLAG team presented the project’s challenge to identify shared aspects of ‘urbanitas’ in towns as different as Augsburg and Aberdeen. The themes of ‘order’, ‘budget’ and ‘unity’, and the digital tools and methods deployed in FLAG, were explored in the first two papers given by the project researchers.
The invitees then presented work-in-progress papers on their own work, covering aspects of medieval urban record keeping, and the interlinked themes of ‘order’, ‘budget’ and ‘unity’. An important goal of FLAG is to bring Scottish and German historiography into closer dialogue, and this was evident in the rich discussions that followed each paper. We were also treated to a display of Aberdeen council register volume one, by Phil Astley (City Archivist). Our hybrid format was a success, with the kind assistance of PhD student Ebba Strutzenbladh as facilitator. All participants followed the current measures for covid-19 mitigation. The programme outline follows below.
A full report on the workshop will be made available at the FLAG project website.
The meeting also allowed for some excursions around the formal planned sessions, including to Dunottar Castle, and Huntly Castle.
The walls of Huntly Castle welcomed some of the group
On 5 November the programme included the following sessions:
Welcome and introduction – Jörg Rogge (Mainz) and Jackson Armstrong (Aberdeen)
Wim Peters (Mainz) and William Hepburn (Aberdeen), Digital hermeneutics: methodology and first results from the Aberdeen ARO corpus
Regina Schäfer (Mainz), Talking about Law and Order in Augsburg
Amy Blakeway (St Andrews), War and the burghs, 1528–1550
Julia Bruch (Köln), Accounting Practices in Monasteries, Towns and Courts. Methodological Reflections
Dunottar Castle ruins
Elizabeth Gemmill (Oxford), The language of things: descriptions of objects and consumables in the burgh court records of late medieval Aberdeen
Jessica Bruns (Halle), Knowledge between pages. Book usage as a new form of administrative practice in late medieval Soest
Eliza Hartrich (UEA, Norwich), For the Comene Wele? Languages of Unity and Division in English and Irish Municipal Records, c. 1450-1500
Phil Astley (Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives) – viewing of Aberdeen Council Register volume from City Archives
Some FLAG visitors outside Huntly Castle
On 6 November the programme included the following sessions:
Jens Klingner (ISGV, Dresden), Texts and transmission. City books and account books from late medieval Dresden
Andrew Simpson (Edinburgh), Brieves in the Burgh Records of Aberdeen, ca.1400-1500: Some Preliminary Thoughts
Christian Speer (Halle), Are town books reliable witnesses of the past? Critical considerations on the categories “note“, “transcript” and “fair copy” based on the Libri civitatis and Libri obligationum of Görlitz in the 14th and 15th century
The workshop was held in the Craig Suite at the Sir Duncan C. Rice Library, University of Aberdeen. The crisp November weather offered a sunny treat to participants, some of whom who also took up the kind offer of a visit to see the Kirk of St Nicholas.
One of the medieval effigies in the Kirk of St Nicholas
Following the end of the workshop the sun came out for a visit to King’s College Chapel, and St Machar’s Cathedral, while others went to see the Dons lose to the Steelmen, before carrying on to hear Public Service Broadcasting play at the Music Hall!
Dr Jackson Armstrong (Aberdeen) and Professor Dr Jörg Rogge (Mainz), joint principal investigators will be joined by Research Fellows:
Dr Wim Peters (Aberdeen/Mainz). Wim is a computational linguist with a background in Classical Languages and multilingual knowledge extraction and modelling. He has a PhD from the University of Sheffield at the Department of Computer Science in the areas of computational linguistics and AI. His main interest is the methodological application of natural language processing techniques in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, and the conceptual modelling of the knowledge extracted by means of the synergy between scholarly expertise and language technology. Wim’s conviction is that computational involvement in Digital Humanities is in strictly ancillary to the informational needs of domain experts. Only then Digital Humanities and Social Science researchers – a considerable part of whom still remain to be fully convinced of the advantages of the digital revolution for their research – will embrace language technology across the board, from manual inspection and annotation to fully automated analysis.
Dr William Hepburn (Aberdeen). William completed his PhD thesis on ‘The Household of James IV 1488-1513’ at the University of Glasgow. He recently worked as a Research Assistant on the Law in the Aberdeen Council Registers project (Leverhulme Trust, 2016-2019), which focused on Aberdeen’s fifteenth-century burgh registers.
Dr Regina Schäfer (Mainz). Regina is a Research Associate at the Department of Late Medieval History and Comparative Regional Studies at the JGU Mainz. Her research interests include nobility, social mobility and family in the late middle ages. She is especially interested in legal questions and participated in the edition of the court records of Ingelheim (“Die Ingelheimer Haderbücher”). In the FLAG project she will focus on the analysis of Augsburg.
On the evening of 14 June a special event was held in the Town House to mark the completion of the Law in the Aberdeen Council Registers project.
L-R: Vice-Principal Professor Marion Campbell, Dr Andrew Simpson, Dr Edda Frankot, Dr William Hepburn, Lord Provost Barney Crockett, Dr Jackson Armstrong, Dr Claire Hawes, City Archivist Mr Phil Astley. Photo Credit: Norman Adams / Copyright Aberdeen City Council.
The eight earliest-surviving council register volumes were on display, and music and talks highlighted vignettes from the new resource created by this project, Aberdeen Registers Online: 1398–1511. Lord Provost Barney Crockett spoke on behalf of the City of Aberdeen, and Vice-Principal Professor Marion Campbell on behalf of the University of Aberdeen.
The event opened with a performance on recorder by Ruaraidh Wishart, Ed Friday, Kate Friday, and Marie McLean of a special composition entitled Fantasia for a Doric Fishman. The piece drew inspiration from the so-called ‘Fishman’, one of the most well-known decorations in the registers (see ARO-2-0102-01). Until recently moving to Abertay University, Ruaraidh Wishart was a senior archivist with the Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives.
Short talks and highlights were given by LACR members, including Jackson Armstrong, Phil Astley, Edda Frankot, Andrew Simpson, and Claire Hawes. The evening also showcased some creative follow-on projects in response to the registers.
William Hepburn introduced Playing in the Archives, his Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Creative Economies Engagement Fellowship, which investigates how Aberdeen’s registers could provide the inspiration for video game development. William explained how he is assessing the effectiveness of video games as a scholarly medium for examining the burgh records and the historical subjects they inform.
Claire Hawes and musicians Davy Cattanach and Paddy Buchanan performed four Songs from Medieval Aberdeen. Claire’s introduction to their music explained that their composition project was made possible with a 2018 Creative Funding Award from Aberdeen City Council. The trio set out to explore how songwriters can use historical material in their work. These original songs were the result, inspired by stories and themes from the records, and the Scots language of the registers.
There was also a special cake, decorated by Aberdeen cake makers O’Caykx, which displayed some of the information about the words and languages of the registers in icing.
ARO Infographic Cake: Showing proportions of Latin and vernacular words in each register through the scrumptious medium of icing. Photo credit: Jackson Armstrong.
The cake icing depicted the proportion of words in each register in Latin (dark icing) and Scots (light icing). The small amount of orange marked in registers five and six reflects the appearance of a small amount of Dutch (or Middle Low German) in those volumes. The later registers have a greater proportion of content in Scots, and a greater number of words overall. It was a delicious way to mark the completion of the project!
In February 1458 the Aberdeen town clerk recorded the marks of the ‘baxstaris of bred’ who were permitted to perform their craft in the town. An Aberdeenshire woodworker has created two beautiful oak bread boards inspired by these marks. They were presented to Claire and William by the LACR team.
Bread boards inspired by the bakers’ marks, made by Dan Stewart.
William Hepburn and Claire Hawes joined LACR in summer 2016 and this month we recognised the completion of their roles with the project. For two years they have been at the cutting edge of the largest transcription effort in medieval Scottish history perhaps since the nineteenth century – building a corpus of some 1.75 million words from the earliest eight register volumes.
Those who follow the Aberdeen City Archives on Facebook may have seen these marks on World Baking Day. In the 1450s the council was minded to record those men who had permission to bake bread. At other times in the fifteenth century measures were taken to regulate the standard of baked goods, and the use of ovens. In June 1470 an ordinance set out that the bakers as a group were to be held in the tolbooth until all of them paid fines for breaking the standard weight (‘pase’) of bread at 13 ounces. If any were to break the standard in future ‘thair craggis’ (necks) were to be put in the ‘stokis’ (stocks) ‘and sall be bannyst fra the craft for a yer and ilke baxtar that has ane howine sal ansuer to the bailyeis that na brede [be] bakin in thair howynnis bot that sall halde the samyn pase’ . (And they shall be banished from the craft for a year, and each baker with his own oven shall answer to the bailies if any bread is baked in their ovens that isn’t of the standard weight).1
Bakers’ marks, ACR, volume 5/1, p. 337.
In 1458 eleven ‘baxstaris’ marks were recorded in the registers, denoting those men who were permitted to perform the craft of baking. Those who are listed against their marks are: Androu Baxstar, William Club, William Atkynson, Thom of Spens, William Buchane, Thom Imlach, William Catnes, Robert Ranyson, John Quhit Hud (no mark given), Will Baxstar, Thom Glede, and Androu Mair.2
Dan Stewart of Fettercairn Woodcraft was asked by Jackson Armstrong if he would make two bread boards in a creative response to the bakers’ marks.
Dan said: ‘I was really excited to take on this challenge. I thought it was a lovely way to bring these medieval bakers marks into a useful contemporary item. It felt very fitting to use pyrography (burning the marks into the wood) and the resulting effect pays respect to how the marks may have looked branded onto a loaf of bread. I thought the gift for William and Claire was a lovely idea and I couldn’t wait to get started’.
These boards were presented by the project team to William Hepburn and Claire Hawes in recognition of the completion of their roles in the LACR project.
William said ‘The board is beautifully crafted and makes a great memento of my time working with the Aberdeen Council Registers’.
Claire said ‘It’s been a real privilege to work on this material. This transcription of Aberdeen’s burgh registers is going to open up many exciting new avenues for research on Scotland’s late medieval towns, and beyond’.
William Hepburn and Claire Hawes now hold Honorary Research Fellowships in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies.
An important project milestone was reached last month when the last words of volumes 1-7 were transcribed on the afternoon of 18 January. The transcription of the first seven volumes, up to the year 1501, is now complete. Over the past eighteen months or so, the project’s two research assistants, Claire Hawes and William Hepburn, with a small amount of assistance of yours truly, have transcribed 4027 pages – no mean feat!
This does not mean, of course, that the project as a whole is now finished. The checking of the transcription and annotations is still in full flow. Once that is completed a final phase of getting the corpus ready to go online will commence. In the meantime, thanks to generous additional support from Aberdeen City Council to enhance the project, Claire and William have begun the transcription of volume 8. This volume will at least partly be transcribed traditionally, but there are also ongoing investigations into the possibility of having this book machine-transcribed for us by a project called READ. Watch this space for updates on that! Overall our final corpus will in part contain a level of annotation enhanced beyond our original specification.
Now that the transcription of volumes 1-7 is complete, it has been possible to do a word count. This count confirms our suspicions that volume 6 includes a relatively large amount of material, but also brings up some other fascinating facts. The total count as it stands now (this number will most likely change slightly during the final stages of the checking process) is 1,391,217 words. To put this in perspective: Shakespeare’s complete works total 884,421 words. A significant chunk of our nearly 1.4 million corpus (so far) is taken up by volume 6: 539,254 words (39%). By contrast, volume 7, which has 137 pages more than volume 6, contains ‘only’ 332,392 words (24%). On average, then, there are about 547 words on every page of volume 6, but only 296 on those of volume 7. The average across all volumes is about 300 words per page. The scribe of a large part of volume 6 used more of the pages (he only left one of the margins blank, rather than both), he placed his text lines closer together and appears to have written in a smaller hand. The volume with the lowest amount of words per page is volume 2, at only 189. This results from many blank spaces left between court entries, and blank pages.
Above: An illustration of different page word densities and lay-outs: ACR, 6, p. 752 (left) and ACR, 7, p. 508 (right).
It has also been possible to differentiate between words in Latin and in Scots (and those from entries in ‘multiple languages’, that is to say entries with a lot of switches between Latin and Scots, which typically occurs in lists of names). Overall 58% of the corpus is in Latin, 41.1% is in Scots and 0.9% in multiple languages. Two entries are in Dutch. In volumes 1 and 2 (1398-1414) only slightly more than 1% of the words are in Scots. In volume 4 (1433-1447) this rises to nearly 9%. By volume 6 (1468-1486) the division between the two languages is almost exactly 50-50, whereas in volume 7 (1487-1501) more than 68% is in Scots. Much more detailed research into this phenomenon is of course undertaken by our former text enrichment research fellow, Anna Havinga. Anna not only distinguishes between words and entries in Scots and Latin, but she also analyses the development of the language shift by year. But even the very coarse overview given here already throws up some fascinating first indications which future research will hopefully be able to elaborate upon.
aberdeen registers 