Edda Frankot has shown that the burgh records of Aberdeen provide a rich repository of information about maritime trade and its legal regulation in the fifteenth century.1
In fact, many hundreds of entries relating to the same subject can also be found in the records surviving from the first half of the sixteenth century until they start to thin out in the later 1540s, after the Scottish admiral began to assert an exclusive jurisdiction over seafaring causes.2 These entries are not merely of great interest for historians intent on tracing the development of maritime law, but actually constitute the single most significant source available for the period.
Relevant entries can be found in other burgh records, and seafaring causes were occasionally heard in the central courts, but no other source is as richly informative as the council registers of Aberdeen.3 However, for scholars used to working on the records of the central courts, as legal historians tend to be, the burgh records are awkward to handle.4 They are bound to seem both familiar and unfamiliar, and the temptation to focus on the familiar features, while attributing the unfamiliar to curiosities of the recording process, needs to be resisted. The aim of this chapter is not to engage in the task of tracing the development of maritime law in Scotland, which will be attempted elsewhere, but is to consider how such a task might safely be undertaken, which requires examination of the character of the records and of the law found in them.5 After a preliminary overview is provided of the types of entry examined, in which a change in the procedure followed by litigants comes to light, three possible approaches to the study of the records are considered in turn. It will be seen that the choice between these approaches, which to some extent build upon each other, hinges on the nature of the law referred to in the records and on the sense in which there was a �culture of law’ in Aberdeen in the early sixteenth century.
More on the topic Edda Frankot has shown that the burgh records of Aberdeen provide a rich repository of information about maritime trade and its legal regulation in the fifteenth century.1:
- Edda Frankot has shown that the burgh records of Aberdeen provide a rich repository of information about maritime trade and its legal regulation in the fifteenth century.1
- Armstrong Jackson (ed.). Cultures of Law in Urban Northern Europe: Scotland and Its Neighbours, 1350-1650. Routledge,2020. — 304 p., 2020
- LEGAL CAUSES