Documents as objects
The common books and their relationship to other documents should not be understood purely in terms of literacy, however. Brian Stock has written that �literacy is not textuality.
One can be literate without the overt use of texts, and one can use texts extensively without evidencing literacy’49. Andy Wood, writing of memory and custom in early modern England noted that the sensory or material was intertwined with the cerebral or literate.50 Richard Firth Green found that in late medieval England, �written documents might still be regarded as potent artifacts’ and the written word �objectified, fetishised and demonised’.51 Much of what is written in the common books concerns rituals that governed aspects of life in the town such as the punishment of transgressors or the transfer of lands within the town. For example, people found guilty of crimes could be made to process with candles they paid for as fines and prostrate themselves barefooted and bareheaded, wearing only a gown, before their victims at the high altar in St Nicholas parish church, sometimes offering up the knife with which they had committed the crime.52 �Earth and stone’ were presented before the court as part of the ritual involved in recovering burgage lands for which rent had not been paid.53 Kathryn Reyerson has described such rituals as �rituals of medieval business’. They were not like the dramatic rituals of royal entries or coronations, but rather �repeated actions and gestures of a formal nature’ which provided assurance and asserted legitimacy.54Written records not only described such rituals, they could be used in them. The power invested in ritual involving written documents is suggested by records of a court case in Aberdeen involving John of Kintore, Robert Boyd and Henry Hartwitson in 1468.55 The case centred around a dispute over barrels of salmon.
According to the depositions of witnesses, Henry Hartwitson was owed two barrels each from both John and Robert. Robert had given two barrels to Henry. The dispute arose because Robert said these had been paid to settle John’s debt, whereas Henry insisted that they had settled Robert’s own debt. Why this distinction was so crucial to these people is not clear, but most relevant for the present argument is the testimony of Isabell, Robert Boyd’s wife.56 What she appears to have said is that Henry brought Robert’s �obligation’ (that is, the document that acted as a receipt of the debt and which was to be returned when the debt was cleared) to Robert but that Robert asked for John’s obligation instead because this was the debt he believed to have been paid. An argument seems to have developed as Robert refused to take the obligation for his own debt which Henry had brought. Henry then apparently tried to throw the obligation into the hands of Isabell but her husband told her not to take it. At this point, Henry picked up the obligation and threw it into the fire, and in response Robert took it �apon his sawle’ that Henry had been paid of two barrels of John’s salmon. The emphasis placed on physical contact with the record of debt in this case, and the inclusion of the detailed narrative of these events in legal proceedings, illustrates the potent materiality of written records and echoes Firth Green’s observation of late medieval England that �documents were sometimes still thought of as somehow symbolizing, rather than merely recording, the legal facts to which they attested’.57The civic archives that encompassed the common books also functioned as a focus for ritual under the control of the burgh government. Indeed, the origins of the common books closely coincided with the building of a new tolbooth, the centre of administrative ritual in civic government. This major change to the burgh was initiated in 1393 when Robert III issued a charter granting Aberdeen the right to build a new tolbooth.
Tolbooths, among other functions, provided sites for civic archives. Sarah Rees Jones has argued that �leaps forward’ in civic record-keeping in medieval England coincided with periods of significant change to the civic landscape.58 Within the tolbooth, it is likely that in the fifteenth century, common books, in whatever physical form they existed at the time, were kept in the �common kyst’ (common chest). This was a forerunner to the extant �meikle kist’ (great chest) which was ordered in 1591 at the time Thomas Mollisone made an inventory of the burgh’s records.59 Recent work on the Yarmouth Hutch gives an indication of how such chests were used. The Hutch, which had existed since at least 1542, held a diverse collection of records of the town’s rights. By the late sixteenth century it comprised �an iron-bound oaken trunk and an array of boxes, compartments and shelves’ and there was a Hutch book which recorded loans of documents and new additions to the collection.60 Evidence for Aberdeen’s �common kyst’ from the Aberdeen Council Registers shows that documents were placed in and produced from the kist; that financial calculations were made on it; that the common clerk appears to have been responsible for looking after it; and that it was furnished with some kind of enclosure.61 One entry also reveals its use as the focal point of a ritual of forgiveness of the type which usually took place in St Nicholas Kirk. In 1488, William Portar was found guilty of a breach of the peace at the burgh’s bailies’ court and, to make amends, he was asked to come to the tolbooth door and then come before the common kist bareheaded to beseech the alderman and the council to ask Andrew Branch, the bailie, to remit the offence Portar had done to him, after which Portar was to sit down on one knee and ask Branch’s forgiveness.62 This substituted the tolbooth for the church and the kist for the altar, with the enclosure around the kist further suggesting this physical and conceptual parallel.The common books, too, had power as objects which went beyond the strictly literate use of their contents. The keeping of these records in a form, which meant many years’ worth of judgements and ordinances laid down by the burgh authorities could be contained in a single object, meant that the registers could function as a powerful symbol of the authority of the burgh community. In April 1474 David Collison was given the special privilege of being allowed to be the first to present someone to become a burgess after a year when no burgesses were to be made except for sons of burgesses. The reason he was given this privilege was that he had secured the return, presumably by making a payment on behalf of the burgh, of a common book which had been given as a guarantee to John of Mar.63 The value of the book in this case was presumably not the inherent value of its materials or the information within it, but its value as a symbol of the burgh community and its good faith. As Mar appears to have been an active participant in Aberdeen’s burgh government, this example shows the symbolic value of the book only in the context of the burgh community rather than to an outside party.64 Even so, the common books, much like the tolbooth and the common seals, were functional objects but also symbols that legitimised the rule of the town elite as representatives of �the communite of the burgh’.65