Volunteers

Whitefriars of Aberdeen: A Working List of Witnesses to Carmelite Charters

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Aberdeen History alum Julia Vallius has created a Working List to identify information about people who were witnesses or affixed their wax seals to many of the charters of the Aberdeen Carmelite friars from 1338 to 1431.

Detail from MARISCHAL/1/6/1/3/15 in University of Aberdeen Museums and Special Collections, licenced under CC By 4.0.

What is it? The Working List tabulates information about the surviving Aberdeen Carmelite charters, listed chronologically. For instance, it records that in 1399 for a charter by which William Crab donated land to the Carmelites, the witnesses included the provost, Adam de Benyn, and twelve other named men. It also records that the seals of William Crab, and of two bailies of the burgh (Simon de Benyn and William Blyndcele) were attached to the charter. This work helps to identify activities of burgh officials and other prominent figures, including in the period from c.1414–c.1433 when there is a gap in the main council register series.

The charters listed here are from the Marischal College Archives, part of the University of Aberdeen’s Special Collections. The Marischal collection in part contains the charters of the Carmelites, or Whitefriars, first established in Aberdeen in 1273.

Two sample transcriptions of charters are included, one in the Middle Scots vernacular, which records a grant in 1421 by Elizabeth Gordon of Gordon, who was the mother of the first earl of Huntly. She made her own gift and also confirmed “ye gift of my lady my eldmoder [grandmother] dam margret of keth ye qwilk my eldmoder has gifin to my said bretheris [the friars] of before tyme gone“.

The charters concerned have some playful illuminations, including that of a cockerel, shown above, and the head of a crowned king in a charter of David II, and intertwined fish, shown below.

Detail from MARISCHAL/1/1/1/4/4 in University of Aberdeen Museums and Special Collections, licenced under CC By 4.0.

Where is it? The Working List is available under a Creative Commons licence on the OSF (Open Science Framework), at https://osf.io/rdsfg/. Its long title is Working List of Witnesses and Authentication of Carmelite Charters, Aberdeen: Held in the Marischal College Archives (University of Aberdeen Museums and Special Collections), version 1.0, https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/rdsfg

Detail from MARISCHAL/1/1/1/4/4 in University of Aberdeen Museums and Special Collections,
licenced under CC By 4.0.

Where does it come from? The Working List began as the appendix created by Julia Vallius for her Senior Honours Dissertation entitled ‘Textual identities and urban communities: Understanding the role of charters and burgh records in the formation and creation of community identities, using the Aberdeen Carmelites charters as a case study’ (April 2020), supervised by Jackson Armstrong. Julia’s dissertation won the Kathleen Edwards Prize in Medieval History. Julia is currently undertaking a PhD in Medieval History at the University of Glasgow.

Julia and Jackson have worked over time to compile a first version of the Working List of Witnesses. Future versions can update, extend and augment this resource. Julia and Jackson are grateful for the support of the Museums and Special Collections throughout this project. 

Working List DOI link [ https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/rdsfg ]

Volunteers build list of provosts, bailies and sergeands in the ARO

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Aberdeen History grads Callum Judge (2020) and Sophia Nicol (2020) have created a working list of civic leaders in the burgh recorded in the Aberdeen Registers Online: 1398-1511.

Sophia and Callum built the list over the summer months of 2020, supervised by Jackson Armstrong. The list was made primarily by identifying elections of provosts, bailies and sergeands which occurred annually at the Michaelmas Head Court, or ‘curia capitalis’, held around 29 September, usually in early October.

Some 756 names of officers who served in the civic administration have been included – many individual people holding office on more than one occasion.

‘electus fuit in officium aldermanni’

The provost, or alderman, was the lead representative of the burgh. The provost was the administrative predecessor of today’s Lord Provost. The bailies had a range of duties, principally relating to justice and land. They presided over their own court, and oversaw the administration of land transactions. The sergeands (sometimes called bedels) were responsible for carrying out the execution of justice in the burgh courts, for instance in issuing summonses and collecting certain penalties. The electorate who chose these officials consisted of the burgesses of the town.

An exhaustive, final tally of all mentions of these officers in the ARO was not the intention in compiling this list. It is a working list – a first version which can be augmented and updated over time. There is not always an election recorded for each year in the ARO, and of course records for 1414-1433 have been missing for more than two centuries. Future work could include capturing additional references to these categories of officers in the corpus, and creating new lists of numerous other figures, such as deans of guild, council members, liners, ale tasters, meat apprisers, and more.

The list may be found here: Working list of provosts, bailies and sergeands in the Aberdeen Registers Online: 1398-1511. It is freely available to all as the first of a set of auxiliary resources to accompany the ARO.

The Aberdeen Registers: A Student Perspective

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By Finn O’Neill, final year LLB student at the University of Aberdeen

Over the past academic year, I have had the good fortune to volunteer with the project ‘Law in the Aberdeen Council Registers: Concepts, Practices, Geographies, 1398-1511’ (LACR), under the supervision of Dr Claire Hawes. As a Law student at Aberdeen with a keen interest in both private law and legal history, the chance to utilise some of the earliest court records in Scotland was an opportunity not to be missed. The LACR project is transcribing the medieval registers in full, and has created a prototype web tool which makes them searchable. This is an excellent tool for the curious, as the scope of material contained in the records is vast and the time period is reasonably extensive.

My engagement with the registers started because the project asked me to help to test the web tool, by formulating queries based on my own research. As much of a degree in Scots law involves tracing the origins of legal principles through history in an attempt to understand their modern developments, I was more than happy to help. I used the web tool to search for things I had been studying relating to succession, leases and Scottish legal history. For example, a search for the word “tak”, the Middle Scots word for lease, brings up over 300 results which include cases of disputes over leases and show the vibrant development of a fundamental part of Scots law.

One of my research points had been to try to find the earliest usage of the Leases Act of 1449 in Aberdeen. The scope of the act would technically have excluded burghs but at some point this must have fallen away as the act is applied across Scotland to this day. However, the registers are neither as specific nor as detailed as modern case reports and as such I did not have sufficient time to find this. Even so, the process of searching through these extraordinary records gave me a significantly better understanding of the topic, because I could see how these legal mechanisms were being used in practice in Aberdeen between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Using the registers allowed me to access materials that few others have used, and find a perspective which had not otherwise been explored. For example I had a better understanding of the customary usage of leases in Scotland outwith the scope of the Leases Act 1449.

Another area of research that I engaged with using the records was the use of brieves in Aberdeen. Brieves are early court writs, forms of actions which provide a mechanism for dispute resolution and their usage in Scotland. This is a particular passion of mine and was highly relevant to my coursework in Scottish Legal History and European Legal History as both courses have considered the use of brieves in Scotland. As part of the project I had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Aberdeen archives in the Town House. This was a fantastic experience as we were able to see many charters relating to the burgh of Aberdeen first hand. My own favourite part of the trip was the opportunity to see a brieve of right which was sewn onto the 1317 Court Roll, and in doing so experience a piece of legal history that I had been reading about for more than half of my university career.

It should be noted that my use of the web tool was greatly enhanced by the fantastic team working on the project. Although I relished the challenge to read Middle Scots, having expert knowledge at hand made the whole process of searching and using the web tool much easier. In turn, I was able to provide the team with details of some of the legal processes that we encountered.

I would encourage anyone interested in the history of Scotland to make the LACR project a top priority in their research. The scope of the registers covers many fields of interest and I can say with confidence that you will be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

My thanks go to the LACR team for the opportunity to work with these most important and truly wonderful records.