The importance of understanding legal culture and its influences has been much stressed in recent years.
Various attempts have been made by scholars to more clearly conceptualise the notion of �legal culture’.1 A significant factor in legal culture is the education received by members of the legal community.2 Legal education affects how a community of lawyers thinks about the law, its rules and practices, which sources they should use in constructing their arguments and ultimately the nature of the legal system in which they operate.3 Much work has therefore been done in recent years on legal education in Scotland.4 At the same time, there remains much work still to do, particularly with regard to the legal communities based in towns beyond the capital city of Edinburgh.
The purpose of this chapter is to provide context to this volume on legal culture, by equipping readers with an understanding of the men of law in one such town during the early modern period.5 Aberdeen was at this time both the urban hub for the north-east of Scotland and home to the second-largest legal community after that of Edinburgh.6 This chapter will focus on two branches of the legal profession within Aberdeen’s wider legal community, namely notaries and advocates. In doing so, it will build on existing scholarship and address gaps in the current understanding of local legal history, while also providing some context for the history of the local profession through comparison with the legal community based in Edinburgh.7