-^4 ^ §CS. SH'S./O? PUBLICATIONS OF THE SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY THIRD SERIES VOLUME XXVIII AYR BURGH ACCOUNTS 1534-1624 1937 AYR BURGH ACCOUNTS 1534-1624 Transcribed and Edited with an Introduction by GEORGE S. PRYDE, M.A., Ph.D. EDINBURGH Printed at the University Press by T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD. for the Scottish History Society 1937 Printed in Great Britain CONTENTS PAGE FOREWORD vii ABBREVIATIONS xiii INTRODUCTION— I. THE BASIS OF BURGH FINANCE . XV II. THE TREASURER’S REVENUE . xxix III. THE TREASURER’S EXPENDITURE . liv IV. OTHER SPENDING OFFICIALS . Ixxxv V. EXTRAORDINARY FINANCE .... c VI. THE KEEPING OF ACCOUNTS . cxiv PLAN OF AYR DURING THE PERIOD OF THE ACCOUNTS, 1534-1624 . to face cxxiii NOTE ON THE PLAN OF AYR .... cxxiii AYR BURGH ACCOUNTS (in full) .... 1 AYR BURGH ACCOUNTS (in abstract) ... 69 GLOSSARY 283 INDEX 293 FOREWORD The Buik of the Commoun Comptis of the Commoun Gude of the Burgh of Air is a volume consisting of title-page, 139 leaves written on both sides, and 15 blank leaves at the end ; the page-size is ll£ by 15 inches. Although the accounts were hundin and put togidder in ordour in 1603 by the then Town Clerk, John Masoun, they have been brought down to the year 1624 and re-bound at a much later date in their present format—half brown suede with marbled-paper boards. The accounts for the years 1541-47 were written in ink which has remained very dark, but elsewhere it has faded to a medium brown. The buff-coloured paper has suffered badly in places from damp and, at the lower corners, is often rubbed away, stained, brittle or otherwise damaged ; and the edges have been cut at least once.1 On the other hand, the margins, though variable, are frequently wide ; and there is a good deal of formal and repetitive matter. As a result, singularly little is irretrievably lost or wholly indecipherable, and the value of the MS. is hardly affected by the toll of the years. The accounts are in three different hands. Those for the years 1534-47 were made out and written by Henry Prestoun 2 (who signed many of them3) for the audit, which normally took place shortly after the close of the year of account. For the next fifteen years, 1547-62, a different method was adopted : a single audit was held for all of them, on Jan. 6, 1562/3, and they were written 1 P. 186 n. 2. * P. 104 n. 1. 8 E.g. p. 29. vli viii AYR BURGH ACCOUNTS down together by Mr. Michael Wallace,1 the Town Clerk at that time. These 28 years, occupying 59 leaves of our2 present MS., seem to have formed the earliest buik. There is a blank of 12 years—1562-74—though these were probably the accounts for the hearing of which a writer was brought from Edinburgh.3 The accounts for the last fifty years, 1574-1624, were all written and mostly signed by the perennial Town Clerk, John Masoun, whose period as a writer of compts runs for slightly less than 39 years —from Oct. 1586 4 to May 1625. Of the value of the present record there can be no doubt. There are earlier sources (some of them printed B) than the Ayr MS., but a competent critic, after a careful search and survey of Scottish burgh archives, concluded that ‘ this is probably the most complete set of early Town Accounts extant in Scotland.’ 6 We have here, with only a single gap of twelve years, a continuous and compre- hensive record of the normal financial workings of an important Scots burgh during the ninety years stretching from the middle period of James V’s personal rule to near the close of James Vi’s reign. While Council Minutes and Court Books cast many a side-light on the financial system of the burghs, that system, in its entirety, can be recon- structed only from the evidence offered by a complete record of the year-to-year raising and spending of the municipal revenues and of the conciliar control of the responsible magistrates. 1 He signed a Memorandum on fol. 38 v., and his handwriting is un- mistakable ; but Thomas Cranstoun is mentioned in 1551-52 as ordouring compts ; p. 114 n. 2. 2 P. 135 n. 3. 8 P. 136 n. 1. * The compts for the eleven years 1574-85 were all audited in April 1587. 6 Esp. for Aberdeen (Extracts, 1398-1657, in Spalding Club Misc., V); a few fragments or whole accounts of other burghs are included in volumes of Burgh Records, e.g. Lanark Rees., 1-2. 6 Anna J. Mill, An Inventory of the MS. Records of the Older Royal Burghs of Scotland (St. Andrews Univ. Publication No. XVII, 1923), 9. FOREWORD ix Despite the obvious value of the MS., considerations other than sheer bulk (it runs to something like 300,000 words) render it undesirable to present all the accounts in extenso. For the first five years (1534-39) the auditors considered, in addition to the intromissions of the three or more spending magistrates, the current financial re- lationship between the toun and all private burgesses who held any part of the burghal property and revenues, and the balance between the parties was entered in every case. While this unique feature of the Ayr MS. is worth stressing, the fact that the substance of these private compts re- appears in the Treasurer’s Charge or elsewhere argues against printing them in full for each year.1 The formal nature of the headings of the compts, the verbiage of many items both of Charge and Discharge, and the annual repetition of the details of Dependentia, are further pointers towards the advisability of economy and compression. The continuity and completeness of the accounts would, however, be sacrificed by the adoption of the old method of printing a selection of extracts. A volume constructed along these lines would be virtually valueless to the student of burgh finance, and might, since the selection must be to some extent arbitrary, exclude the very items of interest to those wishing to consult the record for any other reason. The full compts for four selected years, together with several additional compts of special interest, have, there- fore, been printed in extenso as specimens, and more especially to show the methods of accounting and auditing. For the remaining 74 years, the accounts are given in abstract, all formal and repetitive matter being suppressed, but all items of Charge and Discharge presented in com- pressed form; significant, peculiar or obscure words, 1 The private compts for 1536-37 occupy fourteen pages of print (3-16). AYR BURGH ACCOUNTS phrases or passages are reproduced in the original of the text. I have made a virtue of the necessity of compression by arranging the various items, especially of the Treasurer’s Discharge, under sub-headings, wherever the nature of the items made this course possible and their number made it advisable ; the reader will, of course, understand that the Exoneratio of the text shows no trace of any such systematic arrangement, and that it is here adopted only for con- venience. In the transcription of the text, I have followed the modern practice of expanding all abbreviations {dni., dti., pns., Ire. and so forth) and all the customary symbols (e.g. those for con, per, pre and pro, the superscript r for ur and t for th, the apostrophe for er, the superscript dash for morn). A few departures from convention and orthodoxy must, however, be noticed, since not all palaeographers would approve. The final ss has been rendered ss or ssis, as the sense seemed to demand. Punctuation has been modernised, though with the minimum of change ; so, too, with capitals, since there seemed no object in preserving such anomalous and purely accidental forms as In, Irn, robert or jamesoun. A similarly haphazard use of u and v has been corrected, as a rule, in the same way, so that forms like Dauidsone, seruice, Brovne and vp are rendered Davidsone, service, Broune and up. In clearly established cases of the erroneous and casual use of w for u or v, or vice versa, I have made changes ; e.g. from Villiame to Williame, from vyne to wyne, from wncomptit to uncomptit, and from wantage to vantage; but, wherever the use of w might be regarded as more than the mere whim of the scribe, it has been retained {e.g. in yowth, dwm, lownis). The old practice of using the letter y for th in words like the, that and thair offers no difficulty to the modern tran- FOREWORD xi scriber; few would nowadays defend the employment of any special symbol for what was th in fact, and fewer still would countenance the corrupt and meaningless forms ye, yat or yair. It is, therefore, not easy to explain why a similar rule should not apply to the exactly parallel case of the old letter-form 3. Sometimes, in modern transcripts, this form is retained as a special letter, more often it is equated to z—in either case, quite erroneously. There was no such letter as z in the normal alphabet of Middle Scots, and 3 was simply the consonantal form of y—as appears plainly from the forms "ye, ^our, ^outh, ^ole (Yule), etc. The letter y is, of course, by no means unique in respect of multiformity ; the alternative versions of r and s survive in contemporary calligraphy. Confusion has arisen through sustained mistransliteration of 3 as z instead of y, so that corrupt forms of proper names are now established, and the pronunciation changed accordingly—Mackenzie for Mackenyie, Cockenzie for Cockenyie; in other cases the original sound of the letter has been retained despite mistaken orthography, as in Dalzell or Menzies.