Literate culture
The creation and development of Aberdeen’s common books converged with several other developments across this period that served to increase engagement with the written word. Grant Simpson has argued that a �silent revolution in lay literacy’ took place in Scotland in the latter half of the fifteenth century.
Roger Mason has linked this �revolution’ to the increasing availability of education through the new collegiate churches and universities of the period, the increasing involvement of laymen as legal practitioners and the reading and learning inherent in the humanist focus on classical texts. There was an increasing demand for access to the law, which Mark Godfrey has identified as crucial to the formation of a �central’ court of session and which, it is reasonable to assume, led to an increase in demand for legal writing. Written records in Scots began to appear from the late fourteenth century, and by the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Scotland was experiencing what has been called the �Aureate Age’ of Scots literature, in the work of writers in the vernacular such as Robert Henryson and William Dunbar. Literary works in Scots were amongst the output of Scotland’s first printing press, set up by Walter Chepman and Andrew Myllar in 1508.29At the heart of many of these developments were notaries. Notaries were officers created by imperial, papal or royal authority to write legally binding documents. John Durkan and W.W. Scott have noted a substantial increase in evidence of notarial practice from the latter decades of the fourteenth century.30 In relation to Aberdeen, Harold Booton observed that there was an increasing demand in the later middle ages for literate men to deal with often complex documents, in response to which a class of professional notaries developed to serve Aberdeen’s burgesses and, to a lesser extent, local landed society.
Some of them also served in burgh administration such as Sir John Stirling and Master David Nicholson as town clerks.31 The rise of notaries symbolised growing faith in the written word and these men were gatekeepers to its official power and authority. In a different way, town clerks also served this function, making that post a natural role for notaries to take on. The interest of such men in the written word extended beyond its use for the legal documents that formed the bulk of their day-to-day work. Aberdeen notary Andrew Cadiou translated Alain Chartier’s Bréviaire des nobles into Scots in 1508 and one of Scotland’s �makars’, Robert Henryson, is thought to have been a Dunfermline notary.32 Indeed, Aberdeen and its immediate surroundings appear to have had a distinctive literate culture. The earliest surviving work of literature in Scots, John Barbour’s Bruce, was written by an archdeacon of Aberdeen. The Aberdeen Breviary, compiled in the early sixteenth century, was completed under the supervision of William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen. Saints related to Aberdeen and the north-east of Scotland made up the largest regional grouping of Scottish saints in the book.33The link between literacy, literature and documentary practice has been attested elsewhere in this period. Sarah Rees Jones has highlighted how Thomas More’s Utopia drew on More’s familiarity with urban records as a magistrate of London, while Andy Wood has demonstrated that the contents of the Yarmouth Hutch formed the basis of two histories of the town in the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.34 Aberdeen’s medieval records do not appear to have been used directly in this way, but those who wrote and kept them certainly had literary interests, as demonstrated by the poems copied into the so-called sasine register of 1484–1502.35 One anonymous poem in the register directly addresses the power and reach of the written word with the following metaphor:
And al the wode in to the warld’ at growis
Wer crafty pennis convenient to write
An al the sey undir the hevin at flowis
Wer changite in Ink and wer’ so infinite
And al the erd’ wer’ plesand papir quhite36
All of this suggests that the keeping of common books was in part born of, and contributed to, a growing trend among Scots to understand the world through writing. In this light, the Aberdeen common books can be viewed as part of a late medieval European trend towards increased use of written records which, alongside developments such as print technology, laid the foundations for a major growth in literacy in the early modern period.37