Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland

Elizabeth Ewan, Janay Nugent, Elizabeth Ewan, Janay Nugent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351936439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

In this interdisciplinary collaboration, an international group of scholars have come together to suggest new directions for the study of the family in Scotland circa 1300-1750. Contributors apply tools from across a range of disciplines including art history, literature, music, gender studies, anthropology, history and religious studies to assess creatively the broad range of sources which inform our understanding of the pre-modern Scottish family. A central purpose of this volume is to encourage further studies in this area by highlighting the types of sources available, as well as actively engaging in broader historiographical debates to demonstrate how important and effective family studies are to advancing our understanding of the past. Articles in the first section demonstrate the richness and variety of sources that exist for studies of the Scottish family. These essays clearly highlight the uniqueness, feasibility and value of family studies for pre-industrial Scotland. The second and third sections expand upon the arguments made in part one to demonstrate the importance of family studies for engaging in broader historiographical issues. The focus of section two is internal to the family. These articles assess specific family roles and how they interact with broader social forces/issues. In the final section the authors explore issues of kinship ties (an issue particularly associated with popular images of Scotland) to examine how family networks are used as a vehicle for social organization.

PART 1
Sources

Chapter 1

Finding the Family in the Charters of Medieval Scotland, 1150–1350¹

Cynthia J. Neville

In April 1354 the suitors of a baronial court convened at Balantrodoch heard an astonishing tale of gross misconduct on the part of the master of the (by then defunct) Scottish Templars in his efforts to win control over the lands of Esperton in Midlothian. The story that the assembled jurors retold was an astonishing one, involving a violent assault on the widow of a deceased tenant, a fraudulent claim on her estate and the murder of her son.² The master’s outrageous actions were a source of fascination to the historian who published an edition of the court record a hundred years ago,³ and prompted another scholar to venture the opinion that there was ‘a genuinely unattractive side to the Templars’ character’,⁴ but the document is noteworthy on several other counts. Not least of these is the vivid detail with which the plaintiff, who clearly came to court primed with facts salient to his claim to Esperton, presented his case. His precise recollection of events and even conversations that had taken place as far back as 1296 bear witness to oral tradition passed carefully down through several decades, an impressive grasp of the minutiae of land law, and (implicitly, if not explicitly) an appreciation of the value of written documents in the curial setting. More than sixty years after the unfortunate widow Christina first lost her hold on the estate of Esperton, Robert Semple of Halkerston successfully won sasine of the lands. On another occasion, this one dating from the early thirteenth century, the monks of Melrose confronted a claim not unlike that of Robert Semple, this time in respect of the patronage of the church of Ochiltree, which they had received as a gift from Eustacia de Colville. When challenged in respect of his title, Abbot William summoned into his court the lady of Ochiltree herself, who recounted in precise fashion the history of her family’s involvement with the church and its adjacent lands.⁵ In this case, too, the successful claim to valuable property depended ultimately on the preservation of a clear record of actions done and deeds written over several generations by members of a kinship group.

The centrality of the landed estate to the everyday lives of the medieval European nobility is axiomatic. However broadly or narrowly historians define the term ‘family’ and however inclusively or exclusively they conceive of the group known as the ‘landed ranks’ none can deny the importance that the careful management of such resources played in the mental, social and political worlds of the later medieval period. Scotland was, in this respect, entirely typical of other British and western European realms; here, too, families considered themselves genuinely successful when the lands that were the basis of their sense of identity passed without interruption – and ideally in ever-increasing extent – down the generations. From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the custom of recording in writing the conveyance and transmission of property became the norm in most regions of Scotland, generating a vast number of deeds known as charters. These are preserved as either original single-sheet parchment documents or as copies, enrolled in contemporary or near contemporary cartularies, often by clerical archivists anxious to protect for posterity the claims of the Scottish church to its many endowments. They record, variously, grants and confirmations of estates and privileges made by donors to monastic houses, episcopal sees and secular beneficiaries; notifications of such grants; transfers of title to lands or their ‘pertinents’ and of rents and other revenues effected as a consequence of litigation; sales and surrenders of property, and a host of other transactions deemed sufficiently important to merit the expense associated with the production of a properly executed, sealed instrument. For most of the period between 1150 and 1350 the structure and form of charters remained flexible, making them amenable to a range of circumstances and adaptable to all but the most complex transactions.⁶

Scholars have long recognised the usefulness of charters to the study of the medieval landed elite. Since the later seventeenth century antiquarians and historians alike have drawn on them to reconstruct the political, economic, social and, most recently, cultural conditions under which families prospered or foundered. This essay is part of a larger study that explores the evidence of several hundred extant charter texts from medieval Scotland. The focus here is on families; not those whose everyday lives were taken up with the stuff of high politics, but rather those whose concerns were local and private. Although they had fewer acres to manage, lairds and freeholders none the less confronted a remarkably similar series of challenges in their capacity as stewards of patrimonial estates as did members of the aristocracy. The strategies they adopted in their efforts to secure and augment their lands were at once the chief focus of family interests and vehicles through which to express and demonstrate family solidarity.

The spread of written records across the kingdom in the century or so after 1150 occurred simultaneously with the early development of Scottish common law. Diplomatic practice – that is, the customs that governed the drafting of formal documents – was based in significant measure on customs that had been prevalent in eleventh-century Normandy and were thereafter carried across the Channel at the time of the Norman conquest of England. For many years after 1150 Scottish charter texts reflected both the new importance of written deeds as well as older Gaelic customs associated with the conveyance of property.⁷ The steady elaboration of land law, traceable in the changing structure and contents of written acta, make charters invaluable sources in which to ‘find the family’ in medieval Scotland. In their changing clauses and terminology, members of kinship groups, wealthy and modest alike, made manifest their strategies for estate management.

The laudatio parentum familiar to historians of Normandy and England, that is, the direct involvement of a multitude of family members in an act of conveyance,⁸ initially found expression in Scotland in the dispositive clauses of charter texts, but also in witnessing clauses, and sometimes both. Around the year 1150, for example, the native landholder Thor son of Swain indicated in his grant of the lands of Tranent to the monks of Holyrood abbey that he made his gift ‘with the advice and consent of my heirs’.⁹ Around the same time, Bernard de Balliol gifted a fishery on the River Tweed to the monks of Kelso, taking care to note in the testing clause that his actions had been ‘agreed and confirmed’ by the king himself and, more immediately, his own son Wido.¹⁰ The approval of heirs might be signalled in equally clear and effective fashion by the issue of more than one deed. In 1152/53 Alan de Percy confirmed in a separate charter his father’s alienation of ploughgates in Oxnam and Heton to Kelso and, lest there be any doubt about the family’s intentions, included in the witness list of his act the names of two brothers and of a more distant male relative.¹¹

Specific mention of consent to a grant on the part of interested family members other than male heirs was also a feature of charter texts until late in the thirteenth century. Around 1200 Malcolm son of Malcolm confirmed the gift his grandfather had made to Cambuskenneth abbey after taking counsel with ‘his family and friends’.¹² When William de Ruthven alienated in perpetuity some family land he, too, stated that the act had been done with the advice and consent of his son Walter; he then included the latter among the list of attestors to the delivery of sasine.¹³ Still again, when Walter de Dercester made a grant to the nuns of Coldstream of lands inherited from his parents, he announced that he had secured his heirs’ approval, then had both his brother and his son set their seals to separate charters of confirmation.¹⁴ On three distinct occasions in the later thirteenth century the brothers John and David of Inchyra disposed of several family properties only after securing each other’s approval.¹⁵

In the mid-thirteenth century, as the evidentiary value of written documents steadily grew in importance, the witness lists of charters became the locus of choice for the expression of family members’ involvement in transfers of property and privilege. The dispositive clauses of written acta never went fully out of favour as appropriate places in which to signal such approval, but from c.1250 onwards the scribes who shaped diplomatic practice began to use clauses of attestation in new ways. Witnesses, it has been shown in other contexts, played an essential role in corroborating, assuring and ultimately authenticating transactions of land in periods when written deeds had not yet displaced altogether ceremonies, rituals and symbolic acts done, seen and heard in public places.¹⁶ The testing clauses of charters in fact, came to accomplish two distinct purposes, one in the context of the present, the other of the future. They were at once a permanent record identifying by name the persons who had been in attendance when livery of sasine was made, whose very presence attested their consent to the act. They were also, however, lists of witnesses who might on some future occasion be summoned into a court of law, and asked to recall the setting and to speak to the donor’s intentions.

The practice of involving family members directly in transfers of property served several purposes, of benefit to donors and beneficiaries alike. In permitting their names to stand among the witnesses to a conveyance, all parties proclaimed their consent to a donor’s actions and, by extension, their renunciation of any claims they might have in future to the property in question. The witness list in effect became as firm a guarantee to the beneficiary that his new title was secure as was the granter’s formal promise of warrandice. Far from being random lists of socially influential persons casually appended to the closing texts of charters, as scholars once believed, the testing clauses played an integral role in ‘corroborating and assuring’ public actions for the benefit of givers and receivers, present and future.¹⁷

The introduction of the notion of family assent to the texts of charters was of vital significance in Scotland in the period 1150–1350. As was the case elsewhere, Scottish society in the so-called ‘feudal’ age was patriarchal, male centred and male oriented. The business of estate management, then, was the near exclusive prerogative of fathers, husbands and brothers. The influence of native Gaelic custom on the early development of the common law, however, set Scottish women apart from their counterparts in England, and gave them considerably more say in the disposition of landed estates.¹⁸ The strength of women’s claims over real property is readily apparent in surviving source materials; so, too, are the consequences of this distinct aspect of Scottish law. Monastic scribes in particular were very much aware that despite the influence of new ideas on the substance and process of the law, native custom traditionally accorded women a strong voice in the management of estates they brought to their marriage (their dowry or, in Scots parlance, tocher) and of lands set aside to support them in their widowhood (dower). When ...