6 THE BURGH AND THE FOREST

Burgesses and officers in fifteenth-century Scotland

Michael H. Brown

The urban communities of medieval Scotland were defined by law as much as economics. The oldest of these burghs dated from the twelfth century and were founded by charters from the king or other lords which conferred legal rights on the new town.

The urban history of medieval Scotland has, not surprisingly, been drawn to the kingdom’s largest towns. Whilst small by the standards of the main continental urban centres, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Perth and, before 1296, Berwick-upon-Tweed were demonstrably important in the development of Scotland.³ As well as being considered as special legal communities, the role which these large burghs played as the key points of contact between Scotland and the wider world, especially as the ports through which wool, hides and other goods were exported and finished goods imported, has given them a central place in discussions of economic change between 1100 and 1550. They have, moreover, provided the best case studies of local religious affiliations and lay piety in the later middle ages.⁴ Yet the centres which have attracted most attention, those mentioned earlier plus the ecclesiastical burgh of St Andrews, were atypical in their size and national importance.⁵ The majority of Scotland’s urban communities, including the 20 or so founded between 1424 and 1488, were small settlements whose significance, economically and administratively, was generally local.

The burgh of Peebles in southern Scotland provides an example of a well- established but relatively small urban community in fifteenth-century Scotland. Peebles was founded by King David I in the first half of the twelfth century. Like that king’s other foundations, Peebles’s role was to provide an economic and administrative hub to the new sheriffdom established around it. It was located on the banks of the upper River Tweed and the alternative name for its sheriffdom was Tweeddale. The royal burgh was laid out alongside a small royal castle, the high street running down from the castle gate in a plan typical of twelfth-century foundations in Scotland. While the castle had never been large and by the fifteenth century seems to have had no military value, the castle mount remained a feature in burgh documents. The site also contained buildings which may have been used by the sheriff of Peebles as the location for his court.⁶ Unusually the parish church was located away from the main street of the burgh on a site across the small Eddleston Water to the west. This suggests the site of a settlement which was older than the burgh. By the fifteenth century religious foundations around the burgh included a chapel to the Virgin, a hospital dedicated to St Lawrence to the east of the burgh and the Cross Kirk, a house of friars on the site where an ancient stone cross had been discovered. This cluster of religious institutions suggests the significance of Peebles, both as the centre of a deanery of the diocese of Glasgow and of ecclesiastical patronage from the surrounding area.

Peebles’s economic value to the crown was, however, limited.

The burgh’s location was dictated by various routeways. By the 1460s there was a stone bridge over the River Tweed at the burgh’s southern boundary which the burgesses maintained.⁹ The king’s itinerant justices used established ways to travel on from Selkirk to hold their court in Peebles (known as the justice ayre). Their route then took them west across the watershed between the Tweed and Clyde valleys to Lanark, following what must have been a key road from east to west in southern Scotland.¹⁰ A similarly easy 22-mile journey existed for travellers from Peebles to Edinburgh both for the burgh’s goods and for local men attending the king’s courts which were increasingly fixed there. However, the burgh’s experiences were also defined by its position in the marches of the kingdom towards England. Though about 40 miles from the Anglo-Scottish border the dangers of this position to property and status in the burgh were reflected by a royal charter of 1452.

In the summer of 1478 the burgesses of this small, but locally significant, settlement faced a direct challenge to their legal rights. At five o’clock in the afternoon on 11 June 1478 at the gate of a house in Peebles, a group of men witnessed the drawing up of a legal instrument. The document narrated the events which had occurred in the burgh that day.¹³ It recorded that Thomas Yellowlock had entered the burgh on the orders of James Pringle. Pringle was the currour of the ward of Tweed, the local official of one of the divisions of the great lordship of Ettrick Forest, which had been in royal hands since 1455. The instrument stated the â€?town of Peebles is situated within the boundaries or borders of the forest of Ettrick’, though it actually stood just beyond its north-western edge. Thomas Yellowlock had come to enforce the authority of the currour within this lordship. Yellowlock carried â€?his little book of paper unsealed’, which contained the names of â€?certain burgesses’ of Peebles.

The text of this letter which had been written four years earlier in 1473 was included in the instrument. In the letter, King James III of Scotland discharged the burgesses and inhabitants of Peebles from answering in the �bounde courtis’ of the Forest. Should burgesses trespass in the Forest or take green wood from within its boundaries, their cases would be heard not by local officers but considered when the king’s justices held their court at Peebles whilst on their justice ayre. The king ordered the officers of the Forest not to compel the burgesses to answer in their courts under the threat of heavy punishment. Citing this letter, the bailies ordered Thomas Yellowlock to �cease from the taking of the said distraints when none should be given by anyone to him in this manner’. Pressing on, Yellowlock then entered the house of one John Clerk and took some wax �in the name of said distraint as he said himself’. The bailies refused to accept even the symbolic display of the officer’s authority. They and their companions

… took back the said wax from him and lifted it from his hands, not in contempt nor in deforcement, as it was said, but for the saving of their liberties and privileges given to them by our said supreme lord king as is manifestly shown in the said letter.

As a means of recording and justifying their actions, the bailies and community had the event recorded by a notary at the gates of John Clerk’s house.¹⁶

The events of June 1478 were not an isolated clash between the burgesses and the officers of the Forest.

The rebuff given to Yellowlock in September 1478 may explain the non- payment of fines recorded in this entry, but it did not end the matter. Two years later, in August 1480, James III issued a further letter, this time with the full authority of the great seal. This stated that the king had heard â€?the mournful relation and complaint’ of the burgesses of Peebles, that â€?in diverse times past and lately’ some of them had been made to appear before the Forest courts. Whether these complaints referred to the charges brought in 1478 or fresh arrests made since then is not clear, but, prompted by the petition, the king ordered his officials to refrain from making such efforts again. Once more King James asserted that the only court to which the burgesses could be called to answer such charges outside of the burgh liberty was during the justice ayre when it sat in Peebles.²¹

It is not surprising that these local events have received no attention from historians of fifteenth-century Scotland. In a decade which witnessed James III’s assumption of personal authority, apparent moves towards peace with England, the sentence of forfeiture passed on the earldom of Ross, the king’s clash with his brothers and the beginning of the crisis of war and political dissension which lasted from 1479 to 1489, the complaints of the Peebles burgesses seem minute.²² However, in terms of the issues raised and their context with regard to local relationships, they represent a useful case study of the changing nature of Scottish government, society and legal culture in the later fifteenth century. In the first place they supply an example of interaction and conflict between an urban community and officers with jurisdiction over an adjacent area, revealing the ways in which burgesses articulated and defended their corporate legal rights. The events also display the significance of major shifts in structures of local administration and society which occurred during the mid-fifteenth century. Though the largest changes happened beyond their bounds, burghs like Peebles were also deeply affected by the alterations to established frameworks of lordship and justice. Finally, it provides an example of the way in which the role of the king and royal government extended and became more complex as a consequence of the increased territorial and jurisdictional presence of the crown up to the 1470s.

The events of 11 June 1478 were the climax of ongoing tensions between the burgesses of Peebles and the officials of the Forest. These disputes may have owed something to the lack of ancient proofs of their liberties on the part of the burgesses. The absence of clear evidence of their freedom from the courts of the Forest may have given the currours the belief that they could compel the burgesses to answer for any actions undertaken within their jurisdiction. However, tensions can also be linked to wider changes in government and society in the region and the kingdom. For Peebles, these related most immediately to the status and government of the Forest itself. This area of over 250 square miles of upland moor and wood had been established in the twelfth century as a royal hunting preserve. During the 1320s King Robert I had turned it into a private lordship for his trusted adherent, James lord of Douglas.²³ For the next 130 years, Ettrick and Selkirk Forest was held by the Douglases (created as earls of Douglas in 1358 and known as the Black Douglases) as one of their principal estates. Their rights of justice over this lordship were not always clear. In the famous emerald charter of 1324, King Robert allowed Douglas to possess his major estates free from royal exactions and from royal justice but reserved crimes of manslaughter to the crown.²⁴ In 1354, however, Robert’s son, David II, granted William lord (and later earl) of Douglas his lands, including the lordship of Ettrick and Selkirk Forest, in regality, implying full regal rights over the exercise of justice.²⁵ There remained debates about the extent of Douglas’s rights of regality in the Forest relative to the crown in the mid-fifteenth century.²⁶

Although Ettrick Forest was turned from a royal hunting preserve into a private regality, forest law continued to apply there. The Douglases also retained the right to administer forest law via its special courts. In 1446 William earl of Douglas had exempted Melrose Abbey from appearing â€?at our courts of the bounds of our forest of Ettrick’.²⁷ This was the court whose authority over them was being contested by the burgesses of Peebles in 1478.²⁸ The bound court dealt specifically with breaches of forest law by individuals from outside the Forest who broke its law. In 1499, in the major reorganisation of the administration of Ettrick Forest undertaken by James IV, it was said that â€?it is complained that the neighbours and inhabitants within the boundaries around the said forest destroy the wood and deer greatly’ and that, to prevent this, the bound court needed to be held each year.²⁹ The taking of green wood, the offence levelled against the burgesses in Yellowlock’s book, which reduced the cover for game, and the killing of deer were two of the main offences within forest law. The third was the cultivating of ground, growing â€?ony maner of corne’, and building dikes or fences to prevent grazing. The efforts by the currours to enforce the law by holding their court and distraining the burgesses lay behind the friction of the 1470s but had been a feature of local jurisdiction since the thirteenth century.³⁰

It is hard to assess the character of Douglas lordship in the Forest.³¹ However, the wider evidence and reputation of the earls make it difficult to imagine that they did not press their rights up to, and even beyond, their legal limits. What this meant for Peebles is unclear, though the timing of the request for a fresh charter in the midst of tense relations between King James II and the Douglas earl in early 1452 is suggestive of the burgh’s involvement in this developing conflict.³² Three years later, in 1455, tensions came to a climax with several months of warfare between the king’s forces and the Black Douglases. Both sides passed through Peebles. In early February, James earl of Douglas had issued a charter from the burgh as he withdrew from Clydesdale into the Borders.³³ Six weeks later, in late March, the king took the submission of at least one local lord, James Tweedie, in Peebles.³⁴ The struggle ended with the defeat and exile of Earl James to England and his forfeiture of property and legal rights in parliament in June.³⁵ The Forest passed into the king’s hands and, in August, it was permanently annexed to the crown.³⁶ The fall of the earl of Douglas was the defining moment in fifteenth-century Scottish politics and one of a series of royal forfeitures of great magnate dynasties between 1425 and 1483. These altered the character of Scotland’s political society and, in many regions, caused a fundamental shift in local government and social structure. Ettrick Forest and the neighbouring districts, including Peebles and upper Tweeddale, provide a clear example of this.

The removal of the earl of Douglas and the royal annexation of the Forest meant that its officials changed from being the local servants of a great noble to being royal agents directly answerable to the king. The evidence suggests that most of these officials survived the transition from the Douglases to royal lordship. The chief official in the Forest was the bailie, who was responsible for leasing the lands of the Forest to the tenants and holding the courts which dealt with normal justice in the lordship. After 1455 the position was held by a local lord, Thomas Cranstoun of that ilk, whose family had been tenants and councillors of the Douglas earls. Thomas probably inherited the office from his father in the 1440s and it would pass to his own son in 1471–1473.³⁷ The same continuity is likely amongst the currours of the wards of Tweed, Ettrick and Yarrow. As the events of 1478 demonstrated, these officers were â€?the backbone of the administration’ in the Forest.³⁸ Each ward had two officials, a currour and a master currour, who were responsible for collecting the fermes and renders paid by the tenants and answering for them at the royal exchequer. They also held the courts which enforced the forest law and collected the fines levied for offences. A reluctance to disturb local structures encouraged the crown to retain existing officials. This is clear in the Yarrow ward. In 1425 Archibald, fifth earl of Douglas, had issued letters granting William and George Middlemast the mastership of the ward of Yarrow â€?wythin our saide forest’ for life.³⁹ From 1455 the Middlemast family would continue to hold office in Yarrow ward and it is likely that the other officials, the Pringles in the ward of Tweed and the Scotts in the Ettrick ward, retained positions held under the Douglases.⁴⁰

However, this apparent continuity of office holding occurred alongside a major change in the leadership of local political society in the area around the Forest. The forfeiture of 1455 removed the established focus of political and social life in the middle march. In place of the earl of Douglas, leading roles passed to a more diffuse group of magnates and lesser nobles. Potentially the most important of these nobles was the branch of the Douglas family which held the earldom of Angus, the so-called Red Douglases. James II had given George Douglas, earl of Angus, lands near Selkirk and relied on him as warden of the eastern and middle marches to defend the region against efforts by the English and Black Douglases to reverse the outcome of 1455.⁴¹ However, George’s death in 1463, during the minority of King James III, left an underage son and heir and restricted his family’s influence at a critical time. George’s younger brother, William Douglas of Cluny, initially stepped into his role. In early 1464 William received the office of march warden vacated by his brother and benefited from a grant of lands near Peebles.⁴²

The 15 years between 1463 and 1478 witnessed a growing connection between local patronage and influence at the royal court which had implications for the running of the Forest. Lands and offices in the area were assigned to individuals from outside the region like the young James III’s guardian, Robert lord Boyd, in the later 1460s and the king’s uncle, James, earl of Buchan, from 1470.⁴³ For local families like the Pringles this development had significant consequences. Their monopoly of the offices of currour and master currour in the 1450s ended during the next decade. William Douglas of Cluny was appointed master currour by 1470 and was succeeded in the office by a royal councillor, David Crichton of Cranstoun.⁴⁴ Crichton’s appointment indicated the way that local families had increasingly to compete for key positions with individuals better positioned to secure royal favour. Though the Pringles retained the lesser position of currour, they were no longer the senior figures in the Tweed ward.⁴⁵ The effect on the Pringles of this loss of a post they had held until 1469, and which they probably felt they had a right to hold, is hard to judge. It is possible that it had an effect on the way they performed the role. James Pringle’s forceful approach to the burgesses of Peebles in the summer of 1473 and the more fully described incident of August 1478 could have been the actions of a local official who was keen to maximise the profits of his court.

This reading of the events of June 1478 in Peebles creates an impression of the burgesses being confronted by the demands of an assertive local noble armed with the authority of office. This image feeds into a wider sense of the place of the burghs in the government and political society of fifteenth-century Scotland. In many political studies, towns have tended to figure as passive settings for events, the king’s courts, parliament and occasionally episodes of violence. The assassination of James I in the Blackfriars monastery of Perth was an event in which the local burgesses were involved, a small number as participants but most as a community caught up in a major political crisis.⁴⁶ In the same way, the burgh of Stirling’s destruction at the hands of the Black Douglases in 1452 was an act of vengeance for King James II’s killing of William, earl of Douglas, in the neighbouring castle. The treatment of the undefended urban space became an easy way to symbolise and react to the king’s act of violence within the enclosed royal castle. James II’s compensation of the burgh for â€?fire-raisings, robberies and depredations, barbarously and most cruelly done by our rebels and traitors’ with a grant of the rights to the hospital of St James by Stirling bridge confirmed the sense that, like ecclesiastical institutions, burghs lacked the ability to defend their rights and property and required active royal protection.⁴⁷ The evidence from Perth, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and elsewhere, of burgh communities making efforts to safeguard and strengthen their boundaries, provides evidence of collective action by burgesses in this regard.⁴⁸ However, they are countered by examples of burghs forming relationships with local nobles which suggest a degree of dependency on them. Aberdeen’s relations with the earls of Mar and of Huntly in 1463 clearly reflected the influence of these magnates in the burgh.⁴⁹ On a smaller scale, the frequent examples of Aberdeen giving burgess status to individuals at the request of significant figures from outside the burgh indicate a more low-level type of influence. In 1440 Aberdeen even appointed a local lord, Alexander Irvine, as their captain and although they determined never to repeat this experiment five years later, other burghs can similarly be seen to have existed under the strong influence of a magnate.⁵⁰ In St Andrews, for example, the provost regularly came from the family connections of the bishop and combined the role with custody of the bishop’s castle.⁵¹ During the 1440s the chancellor, William Crichton, based himself in Edinburgh Castle. The fact that his deputy in the castle, William Cranstoun, was also provost of Edinburgh and that on Crichton’s temporary eclipse in 1445, Cranstoun was replaced as provost by Patrick Cockburn, a partisan of the Crichton’s enemies, strongly suggests the link between urban office and wider politics in the largest burgh in the realm.⁵²

However, there also exist clear examples of urban communities in fifteenth- century Scotland asserting their rights against the demands of royal officials. A number of these revolved around the efforts of burgh officials to defend their rights over fairs, special markets held once or twice a year on set dates. Perth was involved in a long-running dispute with the sheriffs of Perth about the jurisdiction of the latter over the burgh’s midsummer fair. As the burgh had been given the right to appoint its own sheriff, responsible for dealing with local royal justice within the burgh, in 1394, the burgesses clearly regarded this freedom from the jurisdiction of the wider sheriffdom as extending to their fair.⁵³ However, in 1441 the sheriff, John Ruthven of that ilk, a near neighbour of the burgh, had made â€?questionis and demande’ at the fair, clearly exerting his judicial authority over the market.⁵⁴ In response, just before midsummer 1442, the burgesses secured letters from King James II confirming their freedom from Ruthven’s jurisdiction. This did not end the dispute and in June 1443 an arbitration again confirmed the burgh’s full right over the fair and its court.⁵⁵ A final attempt by Ruthven to impose his justice on the occasion in 1444, by taking a thief at the fair, led to an armed clash in which 20 men were reportedly killed.⁵⁶ The whole episode demonstrated the readiness of the burgesses to defend their rights forcefully by a range of means.

A parallel dispute between the burgh and the sheriff of Ayr which began in the later 1450s indicates that the Perth example was not a one-off. In 1458 James II had granted the burgesses of Ayr the right to hold a second fair at Michaelmas (29 September).⁵⁷ The charter included the grant of all the privileges associated with fairs but did not itemise them. In the absence of an unequivocal statement, as at Perth, the local sheriff sought to take over â€?the keeping of the fair’ with its associated judicial profits. This provoked the burgh officials into action. They secured a letter from James II dated 7 July 1459 in which he ordered the sheriff, George Campbell of Loudon, and his deputies to â€?sesse and desist’ from the breaking of the fair and collection of unjust exactions from those present.⁵⁸ On the day before the fair in 1460, the provost, John Multrar, accompanied by the bailies and with the assent of the community, came to the market cross and had the letter read out. This public assertion of the burgh liberties was designed to forestall any breach of the fair the following day.⁵⁹ Instead, on Michaelmas Day, Campbell’s deputy, John Dalrymple, came to Ayr and demanded that the provost and bailies find pledges (guarantors) for their appearance at the sheriff’s court on the day after the fair. As at Peebles, this demand was met with a firm response. The provost asked for the sheriff’s warrant for his actions to be shown and, when Dalrymple did not produce this, Multrar asserted that the fair was held by royal letters which had been publically proclaimed and which gave the whole jurisdiction to the burgesses and prevented the sheriff from interfering.⁶⁰ Again, like the burgesses of Peebles, the provost of Ayr had both the proclamation of the king’s letters and the burgh’s response to the sheriff’s man carefully recorded in notarised instruments. Instead of the sheriff’s court, the dispute was rapidly brought before the Lords of Council in early October. With the king recently dead, having been fatally injured at the siege of Roxburgh Castle in August, the burgesses received a less supportive response to their claims. The councillors judged that the burgesses could produce no evidence that they had â€?keping, rewling na govirnance’ of the fair (apparently setting aside the old king’s letter). Instead these duties and rights pertained to the sheriff. However, the sheriff was forbidden from exacting unlaws (judicial fines) or other monetary duties from the fair.⁶¹

The matter of the fair was bound up with a second area of dispute between the burgh of Ayr and the sheriff. In another letter written two days after he had dealt with the issue of the fair, James II responded to another complaint by the burgesses. The king stated that the burgesses had informed him that the neighbouring barony of Alloway belonged to the burgh. However, the tenants had been required by the king’s officials to appear as witnesses in the courts of the sheriff, justiciars and chamberlain. This was against the terms of the burgh’s own charters which required the tenants only to appear in the burgh courts. The king confirmed this exemption.⁶² However, over a decade later in September 1471, the burgesses complained to James III that the same practice was continuing. They clearly presented the king with his father’s letter from 1459 as this was referred to in a new statement of the burgh’s rights. James III wrote that the tenants of Alloway were â€?daily summoned by our letters and officers to appear in Edinburgh and other places to sit upon assizes and are compelled by our sheriff of Ayr and his deputes to sit upon inquests and assizes in our sheriff courts of Ayr’. He ordered his officials not to arrest the tenants or the burgesses or to insist that they attended courts other than that of the burgh.⁶³ Although the dispute would re-emerge in the following century, James III, like his father, had given unequivocal support to the freedom of the burgh’s tenants from his own officials.

There are striking parallels between the behaviour of the burgesses of Ayr and those of Peebles. Both responded to what they regarded as intrusions on their rights by royal officials by holding public demonstrations of those liberties. In Ayr, the burgesses proclaimed the king’s letter, which gave the burgesses the right to run their fair, on the day before it opened. The timing was a direct challenge to the sheriff to assert or abandon his claims. In Peebles, the initiative came from the currour, James Pringle. He sent his servant, Thomas Yellowlock, into the burgh either to secure the surrender of those burgesses charged with offences in the bound court, or to distrain (seize) goods to cover their fines. The burgesses responded in a similar way to those of Ayr. They pointed out that Yellowlock brought his indictments in a small unsealed book, perhaps indicating the absence of a formal legal summons. By contrast, the bailies and community had the notary bring out the letter â€?sealed with the privy seal of our supreme lord king’ and â€?narrated (it) by reading and in public form, laying out the liberties and discharges, as it appears, from the said distraints’.⁶⁴ The text of the letter was later included in the notarised instrument which described the whole event. When Yellowlock tried to ignore the reading of the letter and entered John Clerk’s property to take a lump of wax as a symbolic display of his ability to distrain goods within the burgh, the burgesses â€?took back the said wax from him’. They did so not â€?in deforcement’, as an act of violence, but to prevent harm being done to their liberties. The wax from John Clerk’s house may have acted as a symbol of the burgh’s right to be exempt from the bound court of the Forest. Had Yellowlock removed it from the burgh’s own boundaries, both he and the burgesses would have seen it as a demonstration of the currour’s ability to impose his judgement and his jurisdiction on the burgesses for acts done within his ward of the Forest.⁶⁵

The awareness of the importance of such complex public narrations and physical demonstrations of legal rights form part of the environment identified so effectively by Claire Hawes. In particular she stressed the value of making open and public statements concerning legal decisions or claims as a way of validating them against future challenges. Hawes also demonstrated how in the context of fifteenth-century Scottish burghs a special significance was attached to the expression of corporate unity behind a particular position, both internally and in negotiation with external players.⁶⁶ This is evident in the earlier case studies. Stress was placed on the collective action of â€?alderman, bailies, council and community’ of the burgh, binding in the whole burgess body to the actions of their officials. As Hawes also identified, urban liberties were held for the â€?common good’ of the burgh and thus their maintenance and defence was to be undertaken by the whole community.

Underlying all these examples of legal activity involving burgesses and officials has been the clash of competing rights and jurisdictions. The issues have not been identical. The burgesses of Ayr were pressing for the territorial extent of their special legal rights to encompass both the temporary occasion of their Michaelmas Fair and their tenants in Alloway. They sought these exemptions from the reach of normal royal justice as exercised primarily by the sheriff, but also other royal officials such as the chamberlain, justiciar and lords of the king’s council. The inhabitants of Peebles pressed for the activities of burgesses beyond the burgh (and in the king’s forest) to be covered by the exemption of this group from courts with jurisdiction outside the burgh except that of the justiciar and his court of the justice ayre. However, in both these cases, the disputes also reflected a changing judicial environment from the 1450s onwards. It is striking, for example, that, while in the 1450s the Ayr burgesses had complained their tenants were being called to attend the sheriff courts, in 1471 the grievance was that this group â€?are daily summoned by our letters and officers to appear in Edinburgh’ (or other places).⁶⁷ The stress on daily summons to Edinburgh sounds like a reflection of the increasing flow of cases to the king’s council mentioned in legislation of the period. In a different way, as has been discussed, the royal annexation of Ettrick Forest changed the nature of local administration and political society. It meant that the dispute between the burgh and the currour was not between a royal burgh and the agent of a great magnate but between a royal burgh and an officer of the king. James III was ultimately responsible for the exercise of the law of the Forest and, as the burgh’s lord, for the workings of the laws of the burgesses. The ultimate decision in the dispute to hear the cases involving the acts of burgesses in Ettrick Forest before the justiciars on their ayre simply moved the decision into another royal forum. Such a shift merely illustrates the primacy of royal justice by the 1470s and may have been to the advantage of a burgh like Peebles. In his letter sent to the burgesses in 1474 confirming their exemption from the Forest courts, James III wrote

James by the grace of God king of Scots, to all and sundry our lieges and subjects to whose knowledge these our letters shall come, greetings. Know that our burgh of Peebles is an old, free burgh of our realm infeft and founded by our progenitors of most noble mind with liberties, privileges and free burgage, like other burghs so privileged in times past …⁶⁸

Royal burghs were foundations with privileges and freedoms which were both ancient and guaranteed by the crown. The king had obligations towards these products of his ancestors’ patronage and lordship, and in the fifteenth century, such burghs were frequently able to call upon these ties in their interest. Though, as Ayr discovered in 1460 (perhaps significantly, just after the death of their royal protector, James II), this did not guarantee that their claims would be upheld against other plaintiffs, officers or other neighbours, it did confer a significant advantage on appeals for royal support.

The success of the burgesses of Peebles in securing repeated statements of the king’s support for their liberties surely indicates that their burgh was neither politically passive nor important only in a purely local frame of reference. Equally it is important to recognise the burgh as an assertive entity within its own frame. Within three years of the defence of the burgh’s rights against the currour, the burgesses were embroiled in another dispute before the king’s justices. This time the case was brought by two neighbouring landowners who accused the burgesses of occupying Cademuir, which lay on the hills across the Tweed from their burgh, cultivating it and denying access to the herds of their neighbours. It seems that the burgh was stepping beyond the liberties defined in the royal charter of 1452.⁶⁹ This had allowed the burgesses the right to pasture their animals but no more. The plaintiffs, Thomas Lowis of Manor and John Gledstanes of that ilk, claimed that the evidence they presented to the justices and the inquest in Peebles had been ignored and that those involved had exceeded their powers in ruling for the burgesses.⁷⁰ After a delay, in late March 1482 the lords of the council ruled that the case should be heard again in the next justice ayre at Peebles. In the event, and possibly because of the rolling crisis which developed from mid-1482, it was not until February 1485 that judgement was given.⁷¹ In his court in the tolbooth of Peebles, the justiciar-depute, William Lord Borthwick, from the deliberation of a new inquest, found that the burgh possessed the right of possession and sowing on Cademuir.⁷² The verdict provided only a temporary resolution. Friction with the Gledstanes family continued into the next century over the rights to these lands.⁷³ It is probably mistaken to look for any echoes of the age-old tension between rancher and farmer in this episode, but the occupation of new land and the vigorous defence of their position in the king’s courts confirms that, rather than peaceful citizens imposed upon by rough â€?upland men’, fifteenth-century Scottish burgesses could be difficult, pushy neighbours.

The events of 11 June 1478 should be seen in this respect. The burgesses were caught up in a new environment in which the great regality and forest which bordered Peebles had been brought back into the hands of the crown. Whilst this changed the position of the local officials directly, it also marked a shift in the burgh’s position. The burgesses seem to have recognised the potential advantages of this. Their creation of a written narrative of the events into which they inserted the king’s letter confirming their liberties was skilfully done. The narrative created a clear image of the currour’s servant as an intruder onto the ground and rights, both ancient and recently confirmed, of the burgh. Like John Gledstanes and Thomas Lowis, the currour, James Pringle, found it hard to compete with this corporate action and entrenched culture of legal action. Within the local context a community of burgesses represented a powerful judicial and political presence.