SH-- SCS. SHS. SO PUBLICATIONS OF THE SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY VOLUME L RECORDS OF THE BARON COURT OF STITCHILL October 1905 RECORDS OF THE BARON COURT OF STITCHILL 1655-1807 Transcribed by the late REV. GEORGE GUNN, M. A. MINISTER OF STITCHILL AND HUME and edited by CLEMENT B. GUNN, M.D. EDINBURGH Printed at the University Press by T. and A. Constable for the Scottish History Society 1905 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION, .... ix-xxxix THE MINUTES OF THE BARON COURT OF STITCHILL, ...... 1-214 APPENDICES— i. Crimes and Offences, . .215 n. Times of Meeting of the Baron’s Court, . 216 -in. List of Proper Names occurring in the Records of the Baron’s Court, . .217 iv. Some Archaic and Provincial Words occurring in the foregoing Minutes, . .219 v. Prices of Chief Articles, . .221 vi. Barons, Ministers, and Schoolmasters during the Period included in the Records, .... 223 vii. Some Notes on Members of the Pringle Family, . 224 viii. The original Manuscript of the Baron Court Records and its Transcriber, . 236 INDEX, ....... 239 INTRODUCTION These Minutes, begun two hundred and fifty years ago, extend from the eighth day of January 1655 in unbroken series to the twenty-first day of November 1807, a period of one hundred and fifty-two years. When they began, Cromwell was in his second year as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of Great Britain and Ireland: they close just twelve years before the birth of Victoria, later the monarch of these realms. In 1655 Scotland was little better than a conquered province of England. The Lord Protector had dispensed with the services and co-operation of the Scots Parliament, of the Commission of Estates, and in matters ecclesiastical, of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. In the year previous to the opening of the Minutes, the Supreme Council of the Common- wealth of England had ratified its union with Scotland. This union, although coming to an end with the restoration of King Charles n. in 1660, was not without some influence upon the social system in the country ; for by its means the feudal tyranny of the nobility was broken. The tenantry and commons enjoyed more domestic peace and tranquillity than had been their lot during the turbulent and disputa- tious times of Charles i. Two contemporary opinions of the state of Scotland during Cromwell’s Protectorate are worth quoting,—opinions from widely varied sources, yet whose concurrent truthfulness may be accepted. Robert Baillie, one of the most eminent and perhaps the most moderate of all the Scottish Presbyterian clergy during the Civil War, says : ‘ Our State is in a very silent condition, BARON COURT OF STITCHILL strong garrisons over all the land, and a great army of horse and foot, from 7000 to 9000 in number, for which there is no service at all. Our nobles lying in prison and under for- feitures or debts, private and public, are, for the most part, either broken or breaking.’ The other opinion is that of Cromwell himself, the chief personage in the State. He had sent for both Houses of Parliament to come to him in Whitehall to the Banqueting House, and thus he addressed them : ‘ And hath Scotland been long settled ? Have not they a like sense of poverty ? I speak plainly. In good earnest I do think the Scots nation have been under as great a suffering in point of livelihood and subsistence outwardly as any people I have yet named to you. I do think truly they are a very ruined nation. And yet, in a way (I have spoken with some gentlemen come from thence), hopeful enough; it hath pleased God to give that plentiful encouragement to the meaner sort in Scotland. The meaner sort in Scotland live as well, and are as likely to come into as thriving a condition under your government as when they were under their own great lords who made them work for their living 1 (Carlyle’s Cromzoell, vol. iii. p. 342). The foregoing brief glance at the political condition of Scotland at the time when these records begin helps more clearly to a realisation of the domestic condition of the country—a condition which, however, is actually brought before our very eyes in a singularly vivid manner by the manuscript under consideration, viz. ‘ The Minutes of the Baron Court holden at Stitchill Kirk by the Right Worthy Robert Pringle, of Stitchill, baron \and heretable proprietor of the lands, parochin and barony of Stitchill.’ To regulate the administration of justice, Cromwell set on foot a two-fold scheme. He appointed (1) a commission of four English and three Scottish judges to take the place of INTRODUCTION xi j the Scots Court of Session, not only for hearing cases in Edinburgh, but also for the holding of circuit courts in the principal towns. With his second step this work is more especially connected. (2) By Act of Parliament it was pro- vided that in every parish each baron should resume his , former jurisdiction, and hold a court of justice, and take !i cognisance of debts, promises, and trespass. The court officials registered their transactions in Minute-books. Those belonging to Stitchill have never previously been published. • One series of such records, viz. the Baron Court Book of Urie, was published by the Scottish History Society a few years ago. And now that work is supplemented with similar material afforded by the Court Book of the Barony of Stitchill. Those two reproductions, containing, as they do, the very essence of parochial and village legislation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the one in the north of Scotland in a seaboard parish, and the other in the far south in the agri- cultural midlands, supply between them accurate and interest- ing glimpses of the everyday life of the Scots villager at the extremes of the country, the former by sea and land, and the latter purely pastoral and agricultural. The jurisdiction of the Baron was powerful and wide- spread, and formed an essential feature of the feudal system. Introduced at an early period, feudalism flourished in Scotland until the fourteenth century, when various causes il contributed to its decay; and it received the death-blow by ,i the abolition of heritable jurisdiction consequent upon the rising of 1745. The actual formula of the Baron’s jurisdic- tion contains a number of uncouth but archaic words : ‘ Soc, sac, pitt, gallows, toll, theme, infangthief, and outfangthief.’ ‘ Soc ’ denotes the district included within the jurisdiction ; ‘ sac ’ means the right of judging in litigious suits; £ toll ’ implies exemption from duty, also the right to exact duty ; ‘ theme ’ indicates the Baron’s right of declaring who were xii BARON COURT OF STITCH ILL serfs and who were freemen ; ‘ infangthief1 mjeans jurisdiction over a thief within the Baron’s soc ; ‘ outfangthief ’ refers to the right of extradition of a thief caught within the soc of another; ‘pit and gallows’—furca etfossa—is the power of capital punishment, the pit being for the drowning of women, and the gallows for the hanging of men. Such was the parochial court re-established by the Lord Protector, though with greatly limited powers and lessened dignity. In fact it corresponded a good deal to the justice of peace system in England administered by the class whose feudal authority had been suppressed (Hill Burton, vol. vii. p. 320). The Baron Court with which this volume is more par- ticularly connected was that of the village, barony, and parish of Stitchill in Roxburghshire, three miles to the north of Kelso. The name Stitchill is the equivalent of uphill or uphall, and indicates that the parish occupies part of an upland slope, rising at last to eight hundred feet above the sea-level, to which the ruined fortalice of Hume Castle forms an imposing copestone. Its population and church member- ship both appear to have continued very much the same as at present during all those years. Stitchill at that time was in the centre of a disturbed district. It lies upon the highway to England, and midway between the castles of Hume and Roxburgh, almost within striking distance of Duns; hence the villagers could not fail to be well acquainted with the main features of the Covenanting campaign. In fact, the religious tone of the villagers if inspired from the mansion-house was Covenanting. At Duns some had lain in arms for Christ’s crown and Covenant. At Kelso they had witnessed the inglorious and disorderly retreat of Lord Holland and his troopers. Their own broken soldier, Thomas Whyte, military representative of Stitchill, returned to the village, wounded, from the battle INTRODUCTION xiii of Dunbar. And in the sight of every one occurred the very last act of the drama in which Hume Castle had a part acted out to the end. It may be read to-day in Carlyle’s Cromwell, vol. ii. p. 24<4, thus: ‘February 3rd, 1650. Letters that Colonel Fenwick summoned Hume Castle to be sur- rendered to General Cromwell. The Governor answered, “ I know not Cromwell ; and as for my castle, it is built upon a rock.” Whereupon Colonel Fenwick played upon him a little while with the great guns. But the Governor still would not yield; nay, sent a letter couched in these singular terms :— " I, William of the Wastle, Am now in my castle ; And a’ the dogs in the town Shanna gar me go down.” This frolicking humour stood Willie Wastle in no good stead. War is too tragic. So the mortars were opened upon him, which “ gar him gang down.” ’ The population of Stitchill, as of other Lowland villages, was purely agricultural and pastoral.