Scottish Burgh Records in the Later Middle Ages

Aberdeen hosts Scotland’s largest currently-funded digital humanities research project, and its focus is Aberdeen’s UNESCO Memory of the World designated medieval council registers. This project is called ‘Law in the Aberdeen Council Registers, 1398-1511: Concepts, Practices, Geographies’ (LACR), and it is housed in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. For more information on the project see https://aberdeenregisters.org

This PhD project will allow the award holder to complement the work of the LACR team, and to concentrate on the source materials from Scottish towns. Scotland’s urban archives – chiefly in the form of council registers, guild court records, other types of burgh court proceedings, protocol books and sasine registers – begin to survive in quantity from the fifteenth century. In this regard, Aberdeen’s burgh records from the period are exceptional for their scope and volume; but other more fragmented records survive from Ayr, Montrose, Lanark, Dunfermline, Peebles, Prestwick, and Newburgh. This project invites an examination of Scottish burgh records with a view especially to their legal importance, as archives of a variety of jurisdictions, of the cases heard before them, of the litigants themselves, and of a legal culture shaped by local, national and international influences.