Documentary practice in the century following 1398
1398 marked the date of a new initiative in civic record-keeping, at least according to a description made of Aberdeen’s archives by its town clerk, Thomas Mollisone, in 1591. Mollisone wrote that the first register to be kept in Aberdeen was probably the book beginning in 1398.
That there was no book before this, he argued, was proven by the existence of scrolls on parchment containing the courts of the burgh for many years – one scroll to a year – which ended when the earliest register began.12 One such roll, dating from 1317, is still preserved, and it is the earliest surviving local court record from anywhere in Scotland.13 Thus 1398 marked a change in the physical media of the civic records, from parchment to paper and from rolls to books, but there was also continuity. Comparison of the 1317 roll with the earliest book does not suggest a dramatic change in the subject matter or manner of what was recorded, although in the 1590s Mollisone found the content of the rolls limited compared with the records to which he was accustomed. He found in them �Na action nor maner of consequence therein nor yit any ordinanceis statutis or constitutiouns bot onlie Simpill actiouns for annuellis and convictionis of wemen and mannis wyffis for brewing’.14Mollisone also describes the earliest books – from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries – as being bound one book to a year. The internal evidence in the first two volumes of the Aberdeen Council Registers as they survive today supports this, for the pages recording the proceedings of the Michaelmas head court often state �here begins the book of the community’ and often have decorated initials, suggesting that they were once the first pages of separate gatherings.15 Mollisone’s account indicates that material from 1434 onwards existed in bindings covering multi-year periods which sometimes differed from the periods covered by the present-day bindings.16 At any rate, information recorded in this way could be bound into large volumes covering longer periods of time.
This facilitated consultation and invited more elaborate exposition in an expandable format.17Across the fifteenth century the way the common books were created continued to change and new forms of record-keeping emerged to complement the registers. One of the most significant changes was a great increase in the amount of writing in the registers from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the end. Anna Havinga’s research shows that the average number of language tokens per year in the first volume of the register, covering 1398–1407, is 10,791, whereas the average per year by the seventh volume, covering 1487–1501, is 33,106. This suggests either that more business was being recorded in the city, or that what was recorded was now set down in greater detail. There is also an increase in the number of records in Scots. Havinga’s calculations show that in volume one 0.24 per cent of entries are in Scots. In volume four (1433–1447) this rises to 5.57 per cent. By volume six (1468–1486) about one-third of entries are in Scots, rising to 63.89 per cent in volume eight (1501–1511).18
The near-complete survival of the common books of the fifteenth century also allows developments in the deployment of scribal apparatus to be traced. A major change in this area came in the use of marginal notes to highlight the contents of adjacent entries. In the earlier pages of volume four (1433–1447) there are few marginal additions. Occasionally a manicula or the word nota appears to highlight a particular entry or the name of an individual referred to in the entry. There is no clear pattern to the use of these additions and they appear either to have been added by the clerk as he worked to entries he deemed noteworthy (such as a series of abbreviated nota additions next to several statutes) or perhaps added later when a specific case was being consulted, as when �nota alexander coupar’ appears next to an entry about Alexander Coupar on one page and �alexander coupar’ next to another entry about him on the next page.19
By the end of volume four and into volume five (part one) (1448–1466) names were used as marginal notes more systematically. They appeared next to entries which recorded legal cases that lasted for more than one sitting.20 A common reason for cases stretching over several days was that parties being summoned to court did not attend.
For each non-attendance they were subject to a fine. Highlighting these entries would have made it easy to find the stages of a particular legal process quickly, and to calculate the fine to be paid by someone who had been absent on one or more occasion. It is also in such entries that by far the most common usage of Arabic numerals occurs in these records. Arabic numerals are used to record the day of the process (first, second, third or fourth), whereas number words (e.g. �three’) are generally used when numbers are written elsewhere in the records.21 This appears to be a further effort to make it easy to refer back to stages in such a case. A reader could thus scan the margin for a name, and then more quickly be able to identify what day of the process it was if they could also scan across for Arabic numerals rather than looking for a word in the flow of the entry text. From early in volume seven (1487–1501) marginal headings were used for almost every entry recorded as part of a court, rather than just for entries that were given a numbered day to refer to their place in an ongoing legal suit. These were evidently part of a systematic structuring of the register. Moreover, unlike the sporadic insertion of nota, maniculae and names in the margin next to entries highlighted for some particular reason after the point at which they were originally written, these headings were now apparently written before the main text of the entry itself. There are pages where the marginal headings are wrongly aligned to the entry they describe as well as cases where a marginal heading is given but no entry has been provided, clearly suggesting that the structure of marginal references was set up before the entries themselves were added.22There are also signs of experimentation within the common books, which led to the creation of separate books for certain categories of information. Volume four includes the earliest known appearance of guild court records among those of the burgh, before they emerged into a specialised book of their own in the form of the guild court book covering the years 1441–1468.23 It can be argued that the documentary change reflected the response of the burgh executive to the political instability that wracked the north-east of Scotland in this period, arising first from the murder of James I in 1437, and later from the civil conflict between James II and the Douglases in the 1450s.24 For some reason, however, this specialisation appears to have been abandoned after 1468, and guild court records appeared once again in the main series of common books, albeit in far lower numbers than had occurred in the separate guild court book.25 The later fifteenth century saw the creation of another specialised book, designated as a sasine register in archival catalogues, covering 1484–1502.
It primarily consists of copies of land conveyances.26 Other types of material also appear sporadically in this book, such as letters, a written version of an oath and records relating to various courts, including the sheriff court. This varied material suggests further ad hoc, experimental approaches to record-keeping were provoked by this new book.27More was being written and much of it was in the vernacular.28 What was written was made easier to consult, and careful choices were being made about what should be recorded and where. From the rolls of the fourteenth century to the increasingly voluminous and vernacular common books and the further specialised volumes that grew out of them, it seems clear that civic record-keeping in Aberdeen expanded considerably in the later middle ages, and particularly in the second half of the fifteenth century. An increasing volume of written material was consolidated into a form that was more physically compact and accessible than rolls.