The Aberdeen Council Registers survive almost in their entirety from 1398, offering by far the most complete example of such a record from any Scottish town before the sixteenth century.1
These registers were often called �common books’ by contemporaries. That historical term is perhaps also a helpful one for modern historians to adopt in place of other descriptions such as �court book’ or �council register’ because it acknowledges that the use of these books was broad, consisting primarily of records of the process and decisions of the burgh courts but also including statutes and ordinances laid down by the burgh council, records of the admission of burgesses, records of the elections of burgh officials and copies of other documents such as letters from the king.2 The term �common books’ also invokes the idea of community which was central in the political culture of the burgh.
Claire Hawes argues thatthe Scottish medieval burgh community could be thought of as a location, a legal construct and a group of people [and] the overlap between these elements provided a conceptual space which could be appropriated by those in authority in order to legitimise political decisions and actions.3
All usages of the term �community’ in the context of the burgh had the function of describing a given group of people as a corporate body united by legal privileges tied to a particular place. It could be attached to the shared property of the burgh community through terms such as common rental, common work, common purse and common good.4 Community was a term that legitimised the political power of a governing elite by characterising them as a group acting in the interests of the many.5 It underlined the political necessity for those in power to serve the people of the burgh more broadly, while allowing control over this broader group of people.
Aberdeen’s government was dominated by a small merchant elite. This elite was remarkably stable over multiple generations and showed continuing interest in the written word.
They came primarily from a small number of families who controlled politics in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Aberdeen.6 Through the language and ideology of community, they associated their prosperity with that of the town.7 As written records became more widespread and their uses more widely recognised, it appears a member of this merchant elite, William Chalmer, initiated a new way of using writing to represent the burgh – common books.8 In 1486 his great-grandson William Chalmer took over the office of town clerk, showing that the family remained at the heart of civic government and documentary practice.This chapter will argue that the common books of Aberdeen can be situated in a European story of increasing literacy and the proliferation of writing but, just as community was not the inclusive and egalitarian idea it might appear to modern eyes, these common books should not be primarily understood as a means of increasing access to the law and engagement with the written word. 9 Rather, they were another tool for the established elite of medieval Aberdeen to entrench their civic power – an ever more effective tool as people increasingly understood their world through writing and documents.10
This chapter will first explore the genesis of these surviving records and how they changed in their first 100 years or so of use. It will argue that they were a product of a growing emphasis – closely associated, in Scotland, with notaries public – upon the value of writing as a way to represent the world, demonstrated in everything from legal documents to literary texts to the non-literate use of documents in ritual. While tracing part of a similar story to Michael Clanchy’s account of medieval England’s journey from memory to written records, this argument asserts, with similar emphasis to Daniel Lord Smail’s work on Marseille, that a clear division between oral and written culture cannot be sustained. Instead it aims to encompass the full range of engagements with the written word, literate and non-literate.11 As such, this chapter will explore how these records were a central node in the town’s documentary network and a physical symbol of burgh authority, showing how they were useful to the burgh’s elite in both literate and non-literate contexts. Finally, it will demonstrate that the authority of these records was fiercely defended by the burgh administration and the elite that controlled it.