Conclusion
Aberdeen’s common books grew in size and sophistication concurrently with developments across Europe that made written records an increasingly common feature of everyday life. In a town with an already active documentary culture, they became a hub that acted as a reference point for a wider hinterland of documents.
A side effect of this may have been to stimulate the wider use of written records, but the real purpose of the common books, born of the recognition of the power of written records by the town’s governing elite, was to put writing in their service rather than to create a resource to benefit the population of the town more broadly. This is not to say that the wider population did not have opportunities to benefit from the existence of common books – as we have seen, the ideology of community held by the civic elite was that what was good for them was good for the community as a whole and to retain its power this idea must at least sometimes have accorded with reality. Nevertheless, these books offered the entrenched oligarchy of Aberdeen ways of buttressing their power and control over the town’s memory and resistance to this hegemony could be met with strong punishments. The common books, like other objects at the focus of civic ritual such as the common kist and the tolbooth, were at the administrative nexus of an urban culture of law. They reinforced an urban ideology of community in which the needs of a wealthy elite were made synonymous with the needs of the many even as they formed part of a European documentary revolution that would ultimately open up the power of the written word up to many more people.70