Notes

1 These registers survive as a near-complete series from 1398 up to the present day, with the only significant gap occurring between 1414 and 1433. For further comment on this missing material and surviving excerpts from it, see �Uncovering Scotland’s “UNESCO heritage”’, 22 November 2016, available at (accessed 10 December 2019).

2 The books fit into a genre of records that are often called town books, though this term is not used in Aberdeen. For instance, from the 1350s Swedish laws stated that all judicial proceedings in the town should be recorded in the stadens bok (town book) which was kept by the town scribe. Inger Larsson argues that while in the 1350s stadens bok may have referred to a single book, by the early fifteenth century stadens bok was a legal term which encompassed a range of specialised registers; Inger Larsson, �Producing, using, and keeping records in medieval Swedish towns’ in M. Mostert and A. Adamska (eds) Writing and the Administration of Medieval Towns, Turnhout: Brepols, 2014, pp.

3 C. Hawes, �The urban community in fifteenth-century Scotland: Language, law and political practice’, Urban History 44(3), 2017 (special section: �Communities, courts and Scottish towns’, J.W. Armstrong and A. Mackillop (eds)), pp. 365–80, at p. 369; the malleable use of �community’ in late medieval Scotland is discussed further in Claire Hawes, �Community and public authority in later fifteenth-century Scotland’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015, particularly at pp. 50–8.

4 Hawes, �The urban community’, p. 14.

5 For E.P. Dennison, medieval Scottish burghs and the power associated with them, despite perhaps having a greater sense of �oneness’ than their English counterparts, epitomised inequality through their stratification of urban society; E. Patricia Dennison, �Power to the people? The Myth of the medieval burgh community’, in S. Foster, A. Macinnes and R. Macinnes (eds) Scottish Power Centres from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, Glasgow: Cruithne, 1998, pp. 100–31, at pp. 112–8.

6 Harold Booton identifies the 11 elite families of late medieval Aberdeen as the Blinseiles, the Chalmers, the Cullens, the Collisons, the Fichets, the Mars, the Menzies, the Rutherfurds and the Prats (H. Booton, �Burgesses and landed men in north-east Scotland in the later middle ages’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1987, p. 105).

7 Hawes, �Community and public authority’, p. 58.

8 This is discussed in a forthcoming article by the authors; G. Small and W. Hepburn, �Reading the social history of the archive outside-in: Writing and power, c. 1400–1600’.

9 This essay will refer to these books as common books except when referring to their modern bindings and archival classification as part of the Aberdeen Council Registers series: Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives (hereafter ACAA), CA/1/1, Aberdeen Council, Baillie, and Guild Court Registers.

10 Under the influence of Michel Foucault, power has been a key theme in the �archival turn’: A. Walsham, K. Peters and L. Corens, �Introduction: Archives and information in the early modern world’, in L. Corens, K. Peters and A. Walsham (eds) Archives and Information in the Early Modern World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 1–25, at p. 3. In contrast, it has been argued that the parish registers of early modern England were intended to service parishioners’ needs (Andrew Gordon, �The paper parish: The parish register and the reformation of parish memory in early modern London’, Memory Studies 11(1), 2018, pp. 51–68, at p. 53).

11 M. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, and D.L. Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423, London: Cornell University Press, 2003, p. 213.

12 J.A. Cripps, �Report to City of Aberdeen District Council on Missing Register of Council, 26 June 1981’; J. Stuart, �The editor’s preface’, in Miscellany of the Spalding Club, vol. 5, Aberdeen: Spalding Club, 1852, p. 9. The earliest version of Mollisone’s inventory, though less detailed than some of the later versions discussed by Cripps, can be found in L.B. Taylor (ed. and trans.) Aberdeen Council Letters, vol. 1, 1552–1633, London: Oxford University Press, 1942, pp. 47–50.

13 ACAA, CA/5/6, the �Burgh Court Roll’; A.R.C. Simpson and J.W. Armstrong (eds and trans.) �The roll of the burgh courts of Aberdeen, August–October 1317’, in M. Godfrey (ed.) Miscellany Eight, Edinburgh: Stair Society, 2020, pp. 57–93.

14 Cripps, �Report’; W.C. Dickinson (ed.) Early Records of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1317. 1398–1407, Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1957, p. vi and ACAA, CA/3/A2/67, �Catalogue of the Registers and Court Books of Aberdeen’.

15 For example, ARO-1-0071-01 (6 October 1399) and ARO-2-0101-03 (6 October 1410).

16 For instance, the inventory describes a book covering 1434–1460, whereas the current volume starting in 1434 runs only to 1447 (Cripps, �Report’). Project volunteer John Corral has recently identified a reference to the rebinding of the registers, which appears to refer to the earliest form of bindings which still survive in the present day: ACAA, CA/1/1/61, p. 88 (22 October 1742).

17 For the advantages of books over rolls, see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 118, 135–44.

18 A. Havinga, �The vernacularisation of the Aberdeen Council Registers (1398–1511)’, in this volume.

19 For example, ARO-4-0033-05 (February 1435); ARO-4-0030-10 (13 December 1434) and ARO-4-0031-02 (16 December 1434).

20 For example, ARO-5-0323-03 (28 November 1457).

21 For example, The use of �three’ in ARO-5-0119-06 (17 May 1451). The �process of the four courts’ is described in Dickinson, Early Records, pp. cxxxi–ii.

22 For example, ARO-7-0192-03 (25 August 1490).

23 This book has been transcribed in a modern edition: Elizabeth Gemmill (ed.) Aberdeen Guild Court Records, 1437–1468, Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 2005.

24 Small and Hepburn, �Reading the social history of the archive outside-in’; Stephen Boardman, �The burgh and the realm: Medieval politics, c. 1100–1500’, in E.P. Dennison, D. Ditchburn and M. Lynch (eds) Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History, East Linton: Tuckwell, 2002, pp. 203–23, at pp. 213–9.

25 Gemmill, Aberdeen Guild Court, pp. 1–2.

26 ACAA, CA/2/1/1.

27 This book is discussed further in Edda Frankot’s contribution to this volume, in which she questions the use of the term �sasine register’ to describe it.

28 It should be noted that the Sasine Register was almost entirely in Latin.

29 G.G. Simpson, Scottish Handwriting, 1150–1650: An Introduction to the Reading of Documents, Edinburgh: Bratton, 1973, p. 12. Simpson highlights a record from Dundee in 1476 which �casually reveals’ a merchant having produced a legal deed in his own handwriting (p.

30 J. Durkan, �The early Scottish notary’, in I. Cowan and D. Shaw (eds) The Renaissance and Reformation in Scotland, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983, pp. 22–40, at p. 23 and W.W. Scott, �William Cranston, notary public c. 1395–1425, and some contemporaries’, in H.L. Macqueen (ed.) Miscellany Seven, Edinburgh: Stair Society, 2015, pp. 125–32.

31 Booton, �Burgesses and landed men’, p. 8.

32 H. Booton, �John and Andrew Cadiou: Aberdeen notaries of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries’, Northern Scotland 9, 1989, pp. 17–20, at p. 19; E.P.D. Torrie, �The guild in fifteenth-century Dunfermline’, in M. Lynch, M. Spearman and G. Stell (eds) The Scottish Medieval Town, Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988, pp. 245–60, at p. 260, n. 40; and see also A.R.C. Simpson, �Andrew Alanson: Man of law in the Aberdeen Council Register, c. 1440–c. 1475?’, in this volume. Makar, broadly meaning �maker’ in Middle Scots, was used for authors of literary works. In modern times, the term is applied to three poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in particular: Gavin Douglas, William Dunbar and Robert Henryson.

33 T. Turpie, �North-Eastern Scottish saints in the Aberdeen Breviary and the Historia Gentis Scotorum of Hector Boece: Liturgy, history and religious practice in late medieval Scotland’, in J. Geddes (ed.) Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in the Dioceses of Aberdeen and Moray, Abingdon: Routledge, 2016, pp. 239–47, at pp. 239–40, and N. Royan, �Aberdeen and St Andrews’, in D. Wallace (ed.) Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418, vol. 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 363–76.

34 S. Rees Jones, �Thomas More’s Utopia and medieval London’, in R. Horrox and S. Rees Jones (eds) Pragmatic Utopias: Ideals and Communities, 1200–1630, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 117–35, and A. Wood, �Tales from the “Yarmouth Hutch”: Civic identities and hidden histories in an urban archive’, Past and Present 230, Supplement 11, 2016, pp. 213–30.

35 In the later sixteenth century, Walter Cullen, �reader and later vicar of Aberdeen’, blended genres of writing in what is known as the Aberdeen Chronicle, which Sebastiaan Verweij has described as �a generically confused mass of materials: part parish register, part family history, part commonplace book, part verse miscellany’ (S. Verweij, The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland: Manuscript Production and Transmission, 1560–1625, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 132). Priscilla Bawcutt has argued that much older Scots poetry would have been lost were it not for the tendency of clerks to copy them into official documents on which they were working (P. Bawcutt, �The earliest texts of Dunbar’, in F. Riddy (ed.) Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, Cambridge: Brewer, 1991, pp. 183–98, at p. 185).

36 ACAA, CA/2/1/1, p. 172 (u/v spellings modernised); H.M. Shire and A. Fenton. �The sweepings of parnassus: Four poems transcribed from the record books of the burgh sasines of Aberdeen’, Aberdeen University Review 36(1), 1955, pp. 43–54.

37 See for example the work of E. Ketelaar: �Records out and archives in: Early modern cities as creators of records and as communities of archives’, Archival Science 10, 2010, pp. 201–10, and E. Ketelaar, �Muniments as monuments. The dawn of archives as cultural patrimony’, Archival Science 7, 2007, pp. 343–57.

38 ARO-7-0365-01 (date uncertain); the creation of this inventory may have been related to the burgh’s defence of long-held rights to the forest of Stocket, which were threatened by several grants of rights in and around the burgh made to the king’s servant and sea captain Andrew Wood in the 1490s (Boardman, �The burgh and the realm’, pp. 206–7).

39 For instance, an entry from 13 July 1498 shows the alderman John Rutherford submitting a written financial account (ARO-7-0884-04).

40 ARO-5-0547-07 (7 May 1465).

41 ARO-7-0360-01 (27 October 1492).

42 ARO-7-0696-03 (24 December 1495).

43 ARO-5-0483-05 (20 March 1464).

44 ARO-7-0080-05 (6 October 1488).

45 ARO-6-0137-07 (4 February 1471).

46 ARO-7-0872-02 (10 April 1497).

47 ARO-7-0562-03 (12 September 1494).

48 ARO-8-0357-03 (12 July 1504).

49 B. Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 7; Stock’s work forms part of a wider debate about the interaction between orality and literacy framed by scholars such as Jack Goody and Walter Ong.

50 A. Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 252. See generally, A. Walsham, �The social history of the archive: Record-keeping in early modern Europe’, Past and Present 230, Supplement 11, 2016, pp. 9–48.

51 R.F. Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, pp. 249, 251. Green highlights the presence of the written word in medieval Christian iconography, such as the �the widespread image of the suffering Christ as a crucified charter or book spread our upon the writing desk of the cross and lettered with the ink of his blood’, as evidence of the treatment of the written word with �awe and mystery’ (pp. 259–63).

52 For example, ARO-6-0416-01 (16 January 1476).

53 For example, ARO-6-0133-03 (7 January 1471), which refers to earth and stone being presented in a bag; Dickinson, Early Records, p. cxx.

54 K. Reyerson, �Rituals in medieval business’, in J. Rollo-Koster (ed.) Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Formalized Behaviour in Europe, China and Japan, Leiden: Brill, 2002, pp. 81–103.

55 ARO-6-0006-03 (date uncertain).

56 Isabell’s surname is not given.

57 Green, A Crisis of Truth, p. 275.

58 ACAA, CA/3/A1/24; S. Rees Jones, �Civic literacy in later medieval England’, in M. Mostert and A. Adamska (eds) Writing and the Administration of Medieval Towns, Turnhout: Brepols, 2014, pp. 219–30, at p. 224.

59 Cripps, �Report’; The �meikle kist’ can be viewed today in Aberdeen’s Tolbooth Museum and its key is in the collections of Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums; �Meikle Kist Key’, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums, online, available at (accessed 6 December 2019).

60 Wood, �Yarmouth Hutch’, p. 216.

61 ARO-7-0145-03 (9 October 1489); ARO-7-1051-04 (8 May 1500); ARO-7-0454-06 (9 August 1493); ARO-6-0976-01 (13 November 1486); and ARO-7-0880-06 (15 June 1498).

62 ARO-7-0090-04 (14 November 1488).

63 ARO-6-0295-08 (27 April 1474): this may be the same John of Mar as in the entry from 1465 mentioned earlier; the town’s seals too were symbols of the burgh community’s authority and a record from 1447 tells us that the town paid off a debt it owed to Thomas Bernwale of London to ensure the return of the common seal, which had apparently been given as a guarantee of the debt: ARO-5-0723-01 (24 October 1447).

64 See, for instance, a John of Mar listed as part of a group of men chosen by the council in August 1474 to assess who still had to pay two recent taxes or owed any rents on burgh properties: ARO-6-0309-01 (26 August 1474).

65 A snapshot of part of this group in 1480 can be seen in the record of the receipt of a letter from the king to the alderman, council and community of Aberdeen: ARO-6-0609-09 (18 January 1480).

66 ARO-8-0462-01 (14 June 1505); translation:

… an act of the said court book … saying he would prove the said act false in four or five of its points, to the great infamy and dishonour of the said bailies sitting as judges and he that wrote the said act [John Stirling].

67 ARO-8-0476-05 (4 August 1505); translation:

… sit on his knees and ask the said Sir John forgiveness. And thereafter the said Matthew deposed under the great oath that said Sir John was a just, faithful and honest man and notary in all his doings and had made the said act and all points contained in it and that the said act was just and honest in all points contained in it. Also, the said Matthew asked the said bailies and notary for forgiveness.

68 David Nelken contends, drawing on Lawrence Friedman and others, that insisting on this dichotomy between �external’ (i.e. related to wider range of social groups that interact with the law; �demand for law’) and �internal’ (i.e. related to legal profession; �supply of law’) legal culture is likely to obscure more than it reveals and that access to the law depends on the institutional possibilities provided: D. Nelken, �Using the concept of legal culture’, Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 29, 2004, pp. 1–26, at pp. 8–9.

69 The sixteenth-century Menzies family are covered at length in A. White, �Religion, politics and society in Aberdeen, 1543–1593’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1985.

70 See now R. Head, Making Archives in Early Modern Europe. Proof, Information, and Political Record-keeping, 1400–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019 and M. Friedrich, The Birth of the Archive: A History of Knowledge, trans. J.N. Dillon, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018.