Women, Charters, and Land Ownership in Scotland, 1150-1350

Women, Charters and Land Ownershipin Scotland, 1150–1350

CYNTHIA J . NEVILLE

This essay examines some of the contexts in which women appear

especially in non-royal deeds from the kingdom of Scotland in the

years between roughly 1150 and 1350. It is based on a survey of

several thousand charters written on behalf of both men and

women, native, Anglo-Norman and European. It considers how

charter evidence may be used to illuminate the extent to which

women both used and shaped the laws and customs that governed

the conveyance of land in medieval Scotland, and examines

changes in women’s legal capacity over time. Recent studies on lit-

eracy in later medieval Europe have shown that women participated

actively in the literate culture of the period and that they exerted a

sometimes profound influence on written texts themselves, and this

theme is explored at some length in the context of Scottish charter

evidence. Also examined is the extent to which traditional Gaelic

customs in respect of women’s property rights shaped and influenced

the early common law of Scotland.

INTRODUCTION

Around the year 1221 Iseulte, wife of the Gaelic lord Gillebrıghde, earl of

Strathearn, granted to the abbey of Inchaffray five acres in her toun of Aber-

cairney, to be held in free and perpetual alms.1 The charter in which she made

known her gift resembles dozens of other Scottish deeds from the same period:

it includes clauses of address, salutation and notification, a brief body of text,

and a list of witnesses.2 The sealing clause, however, is more unusual. Because

at the time of making the grant Iseulte did not have a seal of her own, she

1National Archives of Scotland (NAS), GD 24/5/1/1.2For a discussion of the diplomatics of Scottish charters of the later twelfth and the thirteenthcenturies, see G.W.S. Barrow, Regesta Regum Scottorum, vol.1: The Acts of Malcolm IV Kingof Scots 1153–1165, Edinburgh, 1960, 69–84 (RRS, vol.1).

The Journal of Legal History, Vol. 26, No. 1, April 2005, pp. 25–54ISSN 0144-0365 print=1744-0564 onlineDOI: 10.1080=01440360500034495 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

requested that Bishop Abraham of Dunblane accommodate her by appending

his seal to the deed; her husband Gillebrıghde did so also. Unusual, too, is the

process by which the countess delineated the extent of the lands she gifted to

Inchaffray. The five acres specifically included pasture for twelve cows and

two horses, a portion of the estate which she herself claimed to have peram-

bulated in the presence of her brothers, Abbot Innocent and several others.

Iseulte’s charter, which survives as an original single parchment sheet,

offers a rare opportunity for historians to glimpse the presence of women in

the customs that governed the tenure and conveyance of land in a native lord-

ship in the period during which Anglo-Norman influence began to penetrate

portions of Scotland. Women land holders were admittedly few, but the

uneven survival rate of Scottish charters from the twelfth, thirteenth and

even the fourteenth centuries has rendered it very difficult to trace the role

of women, native and Anglo-Norman, in the tenurial landscape of the

period. This essay examines some of the contexts in which women appear

especially in non-royal deeds of the years between roughly 1150 and 1350.

It explores how charter evidence may be used to illuminate the extent to

which women simultaneously used and shaped the laws and customs that

governed the conveyance of land in medieval Scotland, and the ways in

which written deeds show changes in women’s legal capacity over time. It

reviews the circumstances, legal, social and cultural, that brought about

these changes, and argues that despite the increasingly steady restriction of

their rights over property during the period 1150–1350 women retained

important roles in the transmission of landed estates. The study is based on

a survey of several thousand charters written on behalf of both men and

women, native and Anglo-Norman, and includes, perforce, documents of pre-

dominantly ecclesiastical provenance.3 The deeds overwhelmingly also record

the grants of persons of magnatial or at least noble rank, although the church of

course welcomed gifts from all persons of land-holding status who wished to

express their piety in acts of benefaction. In the early period the simple charter

form had only just been adopted widely in most reaches of the kingdom.4 By

1350 land conveyance had become so complex that the charter form had

become only one of an array of legal instruments available to lords, tenants,

lessors and lessees who wished to buy and sell land, or to grant privileges

arising from it.

The work of European medievalists in the last three decades or so has

demonstrated beyond doubt that women played a key role in land-holding

3See the list of printed sources consulted in the appendix. The list should be augmented by a con-siderable number of original deeds, some of which are cited in the notes that follow.4G.W.S. Barrow, ‘The Scots Charter’, in G.W.S. Barrow, Scotland and its Neighbours in theMiddle Ages, London, 1992, 94–101.

26 LEGAL HISTORY

society. At first glance this would appear to have been the case in twelfth- and

thirteenth-century Scotland as well. The sheer volume of charters surviving

from the period between 1150 and 1350 dramatically underscores one

observer’s simple assertion that ‘[a] woman might hold land’.5 Yet the

extent to which legal custom and practice facilitated women’s capacity to

grant, sell, lease or otherwise alienate landed property is a topic that

remains largely unexplored.6 The period before 1150, and in particular the

customs that governed female land holding among the Gaelic-speaking

peoples of Scotland, are only poorly represented in extant documents. Their

Latin-language charters number in the dozens rather than the hundreds, and

Scotland left no law books or legal treatises comparable to those that have

permitted scholars to reconstruct complex notions about property ownership

and transmission in pre-Norman Wales and Ireland.7

There exists, on the one hand, some consensus that in the later twelfth

century English legal concepts began to compete with, and in some respects

to displace, native custom. Thus, the twin notions of heritability and primo-

geniture were ‘fairly well established’ by the time of King William I. By

roughly the same date, in the absence of sons, Scottish legal practice

allowed a lord’s daughter or daughters to succeed to his lands as sole or

co-heiresses,8 and the treatise Regiam Majestatem, although of much later

date, assumed that the principle of heritability already had a long history in

the early fourteenth century.9 Yet the lack (or loss) of native law tracts

from the pre-Norman period has proved so daunting an obstacle that historians

5David M. Walker, A Legal History of Scotland, vol.1: The Beginnings to A.D. 1285, Edinburgh,1988, 355.6Elizabeth Ewan’s work on the burghs of medieval Scotland is an exception here, but it deals pri-marily with the fifteenth century and with the urban context. Elizabeth Ewan, Townlife in Four-teenth-Century Scotland, Edinburgh, 1990. See also Robert A. Dodgshon, Land and Society inEarly Scotland, Oxford, 1981, 90–118.7Recent literature on the treatment of the legal rights of women in Irish and Welsh medieval lawtracts is now considerable. For some examples, see the several essays collected in Dafydd Jenkinsand Morfydd E. Owen, eds., The Welsh Law of Women, Cardiff, 1980; Nerys Patterson, ‘Womanas Vassal: Gender Symmetry in Medieval Wales’, in William J. Mahon, ed., Proceedings of theHarvard Celtic Colloquium 8–9, Cambridge, MA, 1989, 31–45; Donncha O Corrain, ‘Womenin Early Irish Society’, and Katharine Simms, ‘Women in Norman Ireland’, both in Margaret Mac-Curtain and Donncha O Corrain, eds., Women in Irish Society: The Historical Dimension, West-port, CT, 1979, 1–13, 14–25; Art Cosgrove, ‘Marriage in Medieval Ireland’, in Art Cosgrove,Marriage in Ireland, Dublin, 1995, 25–50; Katharine Simms, ‘The Legal Position of Irishwomenin the Later Middle Ages’, 10 Irish Jurist new ser. (1975), 96–111; and Dorothy D. Swartz, ‘TheLegal Status of Women in Early and Medieval Ireland and Wales in Comparison with WesternEuropean and Mediterranean Societies: Environmental and Social Correlations’, in BarbaraHillers, Pamela Hopkins and Jerry Hunter, eds., Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium13, Cambridge, MA, 1993, 107–118.8A.A.M. Duncan, Scotland, The Making of the Kingdom, Edinburgh, 1975, 370–373.9Regiam Majestatem and Quoniam Attachiamenta, ed. T.M. Cooper, Stair Soc., 1947, 120–132,139–146, 160–162.

WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 27

have scarcely ventured to explore Scottish women’s rights in property, and

virtually nothing is known about the roles they played in Gaelic land-

holding society. At one extreme there is the – surely exaggerated – statement

that by the thirteenth century ‘the common law of both countries was substan-

tially identical and interchangeable’.10 Another study argues more reasonably

that inheritance customs at the highest social levels, notably in the Gaelic

earldoms, were still ‘complicated’ and ‘uncertain’ as late as King Alexander

II’s time, and that much of this fluidity reflects the uneasy merging of

native custom with Anglo-Norman innovation.11 One implication of this

view is that as late as the first half of the thirteenth century native women

played a more prominent role in the disposition of lands than was then

common in England, and there is some evidence to support this suggestion.

Similarly, studies of the earliest brieves created by the Scottish kings have

concluded that in Alexander’s time the authority that all women exercised

over their estates had become hotly contested territory, with the crown, the

church and champions of magnatial family interests all competing for

control over landed possessions.12

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CHARTERS AS PRIMARY SOURCES

The use of charters as sources of reliable information about changes in the law

is not without its hazards, but neither is it unprecedented. Historians have

made good (if cautious) use of this kind of record in tracing the origins of

common-law principles governing the tenure of land in England,13 and the

work of virtually all charters scholars in the Scottish context has long been

based on the premise that these documents ‘help us elucidate the early

history of the law of property’.14 Like their English equivalents, Scottish

10G.W.S. Barrow, The Anglo-Norman Era in Scottish History, Oxford, 1980, 9.11Hector L. MacQueen, Common Law and Feudal Society in Medieval Scotland, Edinburgh, 1993,173, 174.12Ibid., 174, 225; Hector L. MacQueen, ‘Expectations of the Law in 12th and 13th CenturyScotland’, 70 Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis (2002), 279–290.13Paul R. Hyams, ‘The Charter as a Source for the Early Common Law’, 12 Journal of LegalHistory (1991), 173–189; John Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law: Law andSociety in England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta, London, 1996, esp. 71–72.See also Marc A. Meyer, ‘Land Charters and the Legal Position of Anglo-Saxon Women’, inBarbara Kanner, ed., The Women of England from Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present, Hamden,1979, 70. The value of charters in the general history of dispute settlement in early medievalEurope has been amply demonstrated in the essays collected in Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre,eds., The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe, Cambridge, 1986; see also WarrenBrown, ‘Charters as Weapons. On the Role Played by Early Medieval Dispute Records in the Dis-putes they Record’, 28 Journal of Medieval History (2002), 227–248.14William Angus, ‘Charters, Cartularies and Deeds, 1094–1700’, in An Introductory Survey of theSources and Literature of Scots Law, Stair Soc., 1936, 264; see also 271: ‘cartularies are . . . one ofour most valuable sources of information about old feudal laws and customs’.

28 LEGAL HISTORY

charters were intended primarily to communicate a donor’s intentions to

future generations, when the living memory of those who had been present

at the granting of a gift had long been extinguished. The language in which

they were written and the notions about land ownership that their clauses pre-

serve offer valuable information about the ways in which tenant right became

a fundamental feature of early Scottish common-law principles.

Most of the charters that form the basis of this study survive only as car-

tulary copies. The fact that some of the registers were compiled decades or

even centuries after the deeds they record need not, however, cause great

concern. With a few exceptions the monastic scribes responsible for compiling

Scottish cartularies reproduced faithfully the text of the original charters they

copied. Precision in the description of the landed estates, privileges and rights

that donors granted to beneficiaries represented more than merely a pedantic

attention to detail. Already in the early thirteenth century the ability to produce

written evidence of title in the form of an original deed or a fair copy was

beginning to be accepted in Scottish disputes as strong evidence of sasine.

In 1273, to cite but one example, the abbey of Arbroath sought to recover

from Earl Mael Coluim I of Lennox an annual render of four oxen which

had been promised by the earl’s grandfather and predecessor, but which had

long been in arrear. In a court convened in Edinburgh the abbey’s legal

counsel presented Mael Coluim with ‘certain muniments and writings by

the late Earl Maeldomhnaich and other earls of Lennox’ which stated carefully

the family’s ongoing obligation in respect of the annual gift. Faced with the

uncompromising testimony of written deeds under his own grandfather’s

seal, Mael Coluim had little choice but to admit that he had wrongfully with-

held the render, and the abbey secured ‘in perpetuity’ a handsome (and more

convenient) money rent.15 It was incumbent, then, on monastic and secular

prelates to ensure that their cartularies faithfully reflected the extent and

worth of the holdings that, over the years, came to constitute the basis of

their wealth.

As Professor Barrow has shown, the introduction of written deeds had a

profound influence in shaping and refining the customs and conventions that

governed title to land in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scotland.16 These

developments in turn brought new urgency to the question of women’s

rights in property. One the one hand, the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scot-

tish kings sought to impose and enforce on their subjects a series of obligations

arising from their tenure of crown land. Among noblemen of Anglo-Norman

15National Library of Scotland (NLS), Adv. MS 34.4.3, fos 12v–13r. More obviously, the practiceof enrolling transumpts, which had become widespread by 1350, speaks clearly to the trust thatmedieval Scotsmen placed in the evidentiary value of old charters.16Barrow, ‘The Scots Charter’, esp. 95–97, Hector. L. MacQueen, ‘Scots Law under AlexanderIII’, in Norman H. Reid, ed., Scotland in the Reign of Alexander III, Edinburgh, 1990, 94–95.


descent these were expressed most often in the mounted military service

already long familiar to their cousins and fellows in England, and among

native tenants a more complex series of customary renders and practices,

including service in the common army.17 Everywhere, the burden of fulfilling

these obligations fell squarely on the male members of the land-holding elite.

Scottish rulers, engaged in the process of consolidating their kingdom, found it

necessary on more than one occasion to go to war in order to defend or

promote their political ambitions, and all depended heavily on an army in

which every land holder had a part to play, usually by serving in person.

Women could not perform military service of any kind. Thus, their inability

to discharge the most important tenurial obligations incumbent on the posses-

sion of estates made them, in the most basic of senses, grave liabilities. On the

other hand, both Gaelic and Anglo-Norman custom accorded women pro-

found respect for their roles as transmitters of family blood and also of

lands and goods that they brought to their husband’s family when they

married. Indeed, contemporary opinion vested so much authority in women

as arbiters of family identity that it was not unusual for husbands to adopt

the names and associations of wives whose prestige (and wealth) outstripped

their own. In the later 1190s, for example, Humphrey fitz Theobald de

Adeville adopted the surname of his father-in-law, Walter de Berkeley;

a scant 20 years later William Comyn, already justiciar of Scotia and a

member of a leading Anglo-Norman family, was pleased to style himself

earl of Buchan in right of his wife, the daughter of the last native ruler of

that province.18 Female land holders, then, stood at the nexus of a series of

competing and sometimes conflicting social and political forces. Their roles

as mediators of family blood and property were sufficiently well entrenched

to ensure them important roles in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scotland,

but also to raise vexatious questions about their authority over land, that

most precious of commodities.

A host of recent studies on literacy in later medieval Europe has shown

that women also participated actively in the literate culture of the period

and that they exerted a sometimes profound influence on written texts them-

selves. Scotland, too, produced a modest number of women who shaped lit-

erary productions, chief among them St. Margaret, the wife of Maol Coluim

III Canmore, and her daughter Matilda, wife of King Henry I of England.19

17G.W.S. Barrow, The Kingdom of the Scots, 2nd edn., Edinburgh, 2003, 262–272; Duncan,Making of the Kingdom, 376–383.18Duncan, Making of the Kingdom, 372–373; Barrow, Anglo-Norman Era, 103; J. Balfour Paul,ed., The Scots Peerage, 9 vols., Edinburgh, 1904–14, vol.2, 252.19See especially Richard Gameson, ‘The Gospels of Margaret of Scotland and the Literacy of anEleventh-Century Queen’, in Lesley Smith and Jane H.M. Taylor, eds., Women and the Book:Assessing the Visual Evidence, London, 1996, 149–171; Lois L. Hunnicutt, ‘The Idea of the

30 LEGAL HISTORY

Scholars also acknowledge, however, that ‘[t]he evidence for women as

authors and writers remains significantly smaller than for men’.20 The uncer-

tain status of women at Scots law in the early period of Anglo-Norman settle-

ment has made it difficult to know just how active they were in the production

of the charter materials that constitute such an important source of information

about the tenure of land in the years between 1150 and 1350. Yet references to

women in these documents, direct and indirect, suggest that they occupied

much more than a marginal place in the control and disposal of both rural

and urban estates.

When women are named in medieval Scottish charters they appear in

numerous and varied contexts. They are mentioned most often in the memorial

clauses of donors’ deeds, but sometimes also as donors or co-alienors, and

least frequently as witnesses to the transactions of their kinsmen or friends.

As donors, women expressed their distinct status as legal persons not

merely by the act of granting land or privilege, but equally tangibly in

waxen seals, which at once authenticated their gifts and provided all who sub-

sequently looked at their written deeds with a symbolic representation of their

legal personhood. Charters and, where they survive, their seals, collectively

reveal that while legal theory closely circumscribed women’s actions, legal

practice allowed them opportunities to act as important agents in the trans-

mission of property. Each of these aspects of women’s presence in written

deeds is examined in turn below.

WOMEN AND COMMEMORATIVE CLAUSES

The inclusion of wives and other family members in the commemorative

clauses of early medieval charters was widespread in Scotland in the early

twelfth century, so much so that by 1150 it had become conventional. A

grant of Earl Patrick of Dunbar to the monks of Durham between 1124 and

1138, for example, was effected for the souls of the king and his kinsmen

and for the benefit of his own soul and those of his wife, Ada, his sons and

all his relations.21 The persons commemorated in such clauses, however,

Perfect Princess: The Life of St. Margaret in the Reign of Matilda II (1100–1118)’, in MarjorieChibnall, ed., Anglo-Norman Studies XII: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1989,Woodbridge, 1990, 81–97; and, most recently, Lois L. Hunnicutt, Matilda of Scotland: A Studyin Medieval Queenship, Woodbridge, 2003.20Elisabeth van Houts, Gender and Memory in Medieval Europe 900–1200, Toronto, 1999, 148(emphasis mine). See also Matthew Innes, ‘Keeping it in the Family: Women and AristocraticMemory, 700–1200’, in Elisabeth van Houts, ed., Medieval Memories: Men, Women and thePast, 700–1300, Harlow, 2001, 17–35.21Laurie, Early Scottish Charters, no.CXVII. For a similar dedication, this one of Earl Henry sonof David I, 1143x1147, see also G.W.S. Barrow, The Charters of King David I, Woodbridge, 1999,111–112.


varied widely among male donors, with members of the royal family and

parents sometimes named, and ambiguous ‘predecessors and descendants’

often added. The lack of a discernible pattern in the memorial clauses of

men’s charters of the early period accords well with Professor Barrow’s

general comments that in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when

called upon to record formal grants, clerical scribes were ‘luxuriating

among a large . . . range of variation in verbal formulae’.22 By the mid-

1200s, however, more rigorous standards and greater uniformity had been

adopted in the redaction of these documents. The thirteenth century was a

period of rapid and influential development in the Scottish law of real property

and increasing sophistication is apparent in elemosinary charters and deeds of

infeftment . Long phrases listing the appurtenances of land and the obligations

of feu holders as well as the addition of sometimes very complex clauses of

warrandice discouraged clerks from including matters extraneous to the

business of land conveyance, so that by the later thirteenth century written

deeds, although substantially longer in terms of their wording, had assumed

a trenchant form.

It is therefore all the more remarkable that women’s charters should have

maintained, throughout much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,

clauses that invoked the donor’s family. A few examples here will suffice,

although they might easily be multiplied. Around the year 1220 Margaret

de Vescy, lady of Lilliesleaf, ‘moved out of piety’, confirmed a gift of her hus-

band’s family to Melrose abbey ‘for the weal of my soul and the souls of all

my ancestors and descendants’;23 a decade later, a grant of Ada, daughter of

the native lord, Earl Patrick of Dunbar, commemorated the souls of both her

parents, her husband and ‘all my ancestors’.24 Isabella, countess of Atholl and

daughter of a Gaelic earl, similarly recalled the souls of her husband, Thomas

of Galloway, ‘and all our ancestors and descendants’ when she gifted lands to

Coupar Angus abbey in the early 1230s.25 A gift of Christina, daughter of the

late Adam, son of Gilbert, datable only to the reign of Alexander II (1214–

1249), was effected for the souls of her father, mother, son, daughter-in-

law, grandchildren, the souls of the king of Scots, three members of the

Comyn family, two parsons, and the sister of one of these and, just in case

she had forgotten anyone, the souls of all her predecessors.26 A decade after

the king’s death Eschina, wife of Walter, son of Alan, commended in a

gift the souls of her husband, her king, members of the royal family and

even the king of England, but took care to mention also her daughter Margaret,

22Barrow, RRS, vol.1, 59–61; Barrow, ‘The Scots Charter’, 99.23Melrose Liber, vol.1, no.285.24Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.129.25Coupar Angus Chrs., vol.1, no.39.26Glasgow Reg., vol.1, no.150.

32 LEGAL HISTORY

‘who lies buried in the chapter house at Paisley’.27 Other examples

might be cited from c. 1270,28 c. 130229 and c. 1338,30 and from parts of

the kingdom ranging from the borders to Caithness and from Fife to the

western mainland.

These examples show that the invocation of a woman’s family members,

past, present and future, was a feature common to the charters of both Gaelic

and Anglo-Norman provenance, but they are also important indicators of

women’s capacity to deploy carefully designed strategies. The inclusion of

some names and the omission of others in effect acted as a kind of code

and, despite their different messages, such clauses ultimately underscored

women’s central role in shaping family history. At one level the inclusion

of the clauses was a purely functional practice, conveying to all present at

the ceremony that marked the delivery of sasine that the grant was intended

to endure well beyond the lifetime of the patron, and emphasizing that the

spiritual rewards which accrued to gifts made in free alms extended not

merely to the grantor, but to all persons related to her by blood. Thus, the

prayers uttered by grateful monks and priests benefited not merely the

grantor, but also all those, living and dead, she specifically named in her

grant. On another level, the identification of descendants foreshadowed the

function of warrandice clauses, then complemented and supplemented the

latter when they began to appear more frequently in the mid-thirteenth

century. Both types of clause fulfilled the same function as guarantees that

a donor’s successors would not dispute a gift at some future date.31

The commemoration clauses of women’s charters, however, had another,

more profound significance, one that would have resonated immediately

among contemporaries deeply attuned to the subtle powers of the written

text. Clauses that recalled ancestors and designated descendants reflected

the pride in lineage that was so important a feature of medieval noble

society in Scotland, England and the continent. Genealogy building, although

it came later to Normandy than to other regions of France, was nevertheless

firmly entrenched by the time the Normans crossed to England in 1066.32

Despite a notable difference between concepts of family and parente that

marked the post-conquest period in England from the purely Norman

27Paisley Reg., 74.28Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.120.29Lindores Cart., vol.1, no.136.30Newbattle Reg., App. No. VIII.31Cynthia J. Neville, ‘Charter Writing and the Exercise of Lordship in Thirteenth-Century GaelicScotland’, in Anthony Musson, ed., Expectations of the Law in the Middle Ages, Woodbridge,2001, 85–87.32Lucien Musset, ‘L’aristocratie normande au XIe siecle’, in Philippe Contamine, ed., La noblesseau Moyen Age XI e–XV e siecles: Essais a la memoire de Robert Boutruche, Paris, 1976, 74,94, 96.


experience of the years before 1066,33 the idea (and ideal) of lineage took solid

root among the Anglo-Norman aristocracy. The concept was in turn success-

fully translated to twelfth-century Scotland when Anglo-Norman and conti-

nental noblemen first settled there in significant numbers. The deliberations

about the succession to the Scottish throne in the early 1290s constitute the

most striking display of ancestor reverence that the Scots were ever to demon-

strate, but long before then the land-owning ranks, great and small, had

invested no small time and effort embracing the notion of lineage. The

inclusion of commemorative clauses in written charters provided an opportu-

nity for donors, male and female, to link themselves spiritually as well as

dynastically with their predecessors and descendants.

The invocation of relatives in memorial clauses had an equally strong

appeal among Scotland’s native Gaelic society. Although it is all too simple

to reduce the complexity of thirteenth-century Scotland in particular to such

dichotomies as native/newcomer, Gaelic/Anglo-Norman, kin-based/feudal,

there is a great deal of truth in Rees Davies’ claim that among the Gaelic popu-

lations of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, membership in a kinship group was at

once the chief means of identifying a person and, indeed, ‘the primary inform-

ing principle in the social and economic relationships of the individual’.34

Familial ties defined rank, status, privileges, rights. They had significance

not only in the context of the present, but also celebrated a person’s antece-

dents and exerted strong influence over his or her future. Thus, although the

cultural traditions that encouraged the inclusion of commemorative clauses

among Gaelic donors may have differed from those that animated

Anglo-Norman patrons, both served the aspirations of the land-owning

ranks of thirteenth-century Scotland.

Women in Scotland, as in other regions in Europe, were uniquely posi-

tioned both to perpetuate the memory of deceased family members and to

look to the spiritual well being of future generations. Elisabeth van Houts

has argued that from the time of the earliest Ottonian queens and their daughters

in the tenth century, women in the medieval west were widely acknowledged as

‘crucial links in the chains of tradition binding one generation to another’,35 and

the work of other scholars has suggested that women gave expression to their

special role as keepers of family history in a variety of contexts. Warren

Brown’s comments about the ways in which written deeds such as monastic

33J.C. Holt, ‘Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England I: The Revolution of 1066’,in J.C. Holt, Colonial England 1066–1215, London, 1997, 167–169, 174. See also Derek Pearsall,Gothic Europe 1200–1450, London, 2001, 51.34Rees Davies, ‘Kinsmen, Neighbours and Communities in Wales and the Western British Isles,c. 1100–c. 1400’, in Pauline Stafford, Janet Nelson and Jane Martindale, eds., Law, Laity andSolidarities. Essays in Honour of Susan Reynolds, Manchester, 2001, 175.35Van Houts, Gender and Memory, 147.

34 LEGAL HISTORY

charters ‘upheld the donor kindred’s claim to the prayers of the recipient com-

munity and the favour of the community’s patron saint’ underscores the signifi-

cance of commemorative clauses in women’s charters;36 so, too, do Patrick

Geary’s arguments that in Ottonian Germany in particular, ‘[w]omen . . .seem to have been specifically expected to look to family memoria as a personal

obligation, even when sons, brothers, or fathers survived’.37 While the Latin

charter tradition may have come relatively late to the kingdom of Scotland,38

when it began to proliferate in the twelfth century it provided Scottish

women with new opportunities to give expression to such central cultural con-

cepts as lineage and memory, and to establish their families’ spiritual commit-

ments to particular religious houses, just as it had done for centuries already

elsewhere. It was in acknowledgment of the traditions and obligations of her

continental ancestry, then, that Eva de Quincy dedicated a grant of arable

land to Melrose abbey early in the twelfth century to her lord, King William

I, but also to her father and mother, her two (former) husbands, her brother,

her son, and her sister,39 while Farbhlaidh, daughter of a native landholder in

Lennox, chose to link her gift of land to the cathedral of Glasgow to her ‘pre-

decessors and successors’, but also to her lord and kinsman Maeldomhnaich,

earl of Lennox.40 Irrespective of the different customs that informed their com-

memorative intentions, each woman’s charter established an unbroken line

between the past and future families of the grantor through the medium of

her person. In the varied cultural world of thirteenth-century Scotland it was

still possible to accommodate both continental and native traditions.

WIVES AS DONORS AND CO-ALIENORS

By the early years of the thirteenth century legal custom and practice together

generally acknowledged the ability of women of royal and magnatial rank to

inherit property in their own right. Surviving charter materials, moreover,

suggest that in this early period women entertained more than nominal

control over the disposal of matrimonial property. Ada de Warenne, wife of

Earl Henry of Northumberland and the mother of Kings Malcolm IV and

William I, made grants of land to a variety of religious houses both before

and after her husband’s death with no reference to him whatsoever.41 In the

36Brown, ‘Charters as Weapons’, 229.37Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the FirstMillennium, Princeton, 1994, 62–63.38Barrow, RRS, vol.1, 59–61; Barrow, ‘The Scots Charter’, 93–97.39Melrose Liber, vol.1, no.49.40Glasgow Reg., no.177.41See, for example, Cambuskenneth Reg., no.192; St. Andrews Liber, 207–209; Dunfermline Reg.,nos.151, 152; Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.41. For a calendar of Ada’s acts, see Victoria Chandler, ‘Ada


late 1190s the daughter of Earl David of Huntingdon disposed of an estate she

brought to her marriage apparently without recourse to her husband, although

her father confirmed the grant.42 Still again, Orabilis, daughter of Ness, wife of

Robert de Quincy and a native woman of high standing, confirmed the

former’s gifts to the priory of St. Andrews in her own right, ‘for posterity,

[and] as the heir of my father’.43

The presence of women as co-alienors in some early charters reflects the

interaction of traditional Gaelic with more recent Anglo-Norman practice in

the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Under the latter, a husband

exerted legal control of whatever property the wife brought to the marriage,

though there are indications that a husband would not grant or sell it before

seeking her advice. Thus, in the mid-twelfth century Maria, the daughter of

a burgess of Berwick, confirmed in a separate deed her husband’s transfer

to Kelso abbey of the ferme of some of her lands;44 when, around the year

1200, William de Hay assigned the lands of Pitmilly in Fife to the priory of

St. Andrews, his wife Eva issued a separate charter together with her son con-

firming the grant, in which she noted specifically that she had quitclaimed all

title to the land on her own behalf and that of her heirs.45 Similarly, Henry

Bradforth’s early twelfth century gift of a tenement to Melrose abbey was

effected ‘with the good will and assent of my wife Sigberth’.46 A century

later, when Henry de Melville wished to lease some property in Torphichen

he did so with the consent of his wife Margaret.47 Women were certainly fam-

iliar with the specific extents of the lands they controlled and alienated: like

Iseulte of Strathearn, Elena, widow of William de Brechin, granted lands to

Lindores abbey after leading a perambulation of the estates herself.48 While

mentions of perambulations are not frequent in women’s charters, when

they are included it is frequently in deeds relating to lands that a wife had

brought into her husband’s family.49

Very little is known about the specific rights in property that native women

enjoyed in pre-Norman Scotland. As noted above, preliminary studies of the

interaction and influence of Gaelic and Anglo-Norman customs in such

de Warenne, Queen Mother of Scotland (c. 1123–1178)’, 60 Scottish Historical Review (1981),135–139.42Lindores Cart., no.36, with Earl David’s confirmation at no.9. Ada’s husband, Mael Iosa, son ofEarl Fearchar of Strathearn, was a witness to his father-in-law’s charter of confimation.43St. Andrews Liber, 287–288, 290–291.44Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.3145St. Andrews Liber, 313–314.46Melrose Liber, vol.1, no.172.47Fraser, Melville, vol.3, no.13 (grant of 5 April 1311).48Lindores Cart., no.136.49The examples here are numerous, but see especially Kelso Liber, vol.1, nos.31, 120, 129, 148;Melrose Liber, vol.1, nos.82, 163, 200–201, 261; Aberdeen-Banff Ill., vol.2, 427–428; NewbattleReg., nos.91, 102; Moray Reg., no.107; Scone Liber, no.87.

36 LEGAL HISTORY

areas as inheritance and land conveyance in Scots law have shown that by the

twelfth century Scottish legal practice had endowed women with considerable

influence over the disposition of at least some lands.50 On occasion, charter

texts offer tantalizing evidence that well into the reign of David I native

custom proved remarkably resilient in the face of Anglo-Norman innovation.

This appears to have been particularly the case with tocher lands, the estates

(and other goods) that a woman brought to her marriage. When Gartnait (prob-

ably) mormaer of Buchan and his wife Ete, daughter of Gille Mıcheil, granted

lands to the religious house at Deer soon after 1130, they may jointly have

been gifting estates that Ete had brought to the marriage.51 A generation

later, Gartnait’s daughter Eva and her husband Colban, the latter probably a

nobleman from Fife, granted immunity to the brethren of Deer in respect of

land in Buchan.52 When Michael Scot and his native wife chose to make a

gift of land in Fife to Dunfermline abbey, they did so more certainly out of

her tocher estates.53

By the end of the twelfth century, especially in the areas of Scotland that

had been intensely colonized by foreign settlers, change was in the air, and

the law had begun to restrict the right of wives to alienate property in their

own right. In these regions, native tradition gave way to that of the new-

comers. The grants of William de Hay and Henry Bradforth, cited above,

show that while they might still consider it appropriate to seek the assent

of their wives, husbands issued charters in respect of tocher property in

their own names and under their own seals. Charters in which women

appear as donors also demonstrate similar evidence that their right to

dispose of land was coming under the influence of more restrictive laws gov-

erning property held jointly by husband and wife.54 Around 1207 Margaret

de Vescy, the daughter of King William himself, made two gifts of land in

free and perpetual alms to Kelso abbey under her own authority, but the

inclusion of her husband’s name among the witness lists of both docu-

ments55 suggests that noblewomen’s freedom to dispose of estates without

reference to their husbands’ rights and claims was beginning to be circum-

scribed. By 1220 the four daughters of Alice de Twedemure found it

advisable to state unequivocally that their renunciation of all claims to a

50In general, see W.D.H. Sellar, ‘Celtic Law and Scots Law: Survival and Integration’, 29 ScottishStudies (1989), 1–27; Kenneth Jackson, The Gaelic Notes in the Book of Deer, Cambridge, 1972,58, 118.51Jackson, Gaelic Notes, 33–35, 58.52Jackson, Gaelic Notes, 35-36. Colban’s Fife origins are reviewed in Alan Young, ‘The Earls andEarldom of Buchan in the Thirteenth Century’, in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer, eds.,Medieval Scotland, Edinburgh, 1993, 179–180.53Dunfermline Reg., nos.174–176.54Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.151.55Kelso Liber, vol.1, nos.210, 212.


fishery and their abandonment of all suits aimed at establishing their title to

it had been confirmed by their respective husbands and heirs.56 Similarly, in

one of her deeds Cecilia de Mow, daughter of the Anglian heiress Eschina,

dated c. 1250, noted clearly that she made her gift of land to Kelso abbey in

her widowhood, ‘with the authority vested in me as widow and as lady in my

own right’.57 Despite this confident statement of the grantor’s rights,

however, the abbey took care to secure a separate charter of confirmation

from her (second) husband.58

In contrast to much of lowland Scotland, in the early years of the thirteenth

century women in the Gaelic lordships north of Forth still exercised consider-

able authority over native territory. Long after the death of her father, Earl

Feargus, and her marriage to William Comyn around 1212, for example, Marj-

orie of Buchan was making and confirming grants as countess.59 Elena, daugh-

ter of Alan of Galloway, Ela of Fife and Isabel, countess of Angus, issued

charters under their own authority as Gaelic noblewomen, and indeed included

in the language of their deeds bold assertions of their native identity and

rank;60 so, too, did women of less exalted rank, including Farbhlaidh, daughter

of Kerald, from Lennox, and, as late as 1284, Muriel, daughter of the native

lord Conghal of Strathearn.61

WIDOWS AS DONORS AND CO-ALIENORS

As the thirteenth century wore on, Anglo-Norman legal practice appears to

have exerted a steadily growing influence over native custom, and made it

increasingly difficult for married women to dispose freely of tocher lands.

Yet other legal changes are apparent in the greater freedom that, by the

mid-thirteenth century, women exercised as widows over their dower

lands. By the reign of Alexander II Scottish law protected a widow’s

claim to a third of her husband’s property.62 In the decades that followed

its procedures offered clear remedies (chiefly by means of the actions of

novel dissasine, mortancestry and terce) for the recovery of such estates

and recognized the rights of widows to possess and alienate dower

56Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.67. For a similar case, see ibid., vol.1, no.60.57Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.148.58Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.151.59St. Andrews Liber, 253–254; Arbroath Liber, vol.1, 265–266. See Young’s comment onMarjorie’s assertion of her authority in ‘Earls and Earldom of Buchan’, 179, n.4 and 180, n.7.60Glasgow Reg., vol.1, no.167; Dunfermline Reg., no.153; Coupar Angus Chrs., vol.1, nos. 39, 52.61Glasgow Reg., vol.1, no.177; Inchaffray Liber, App., no.16.62MacQueen, Common Law and Feudal Society, 24; Duncan, Making of the Kingdom, 370;Geoffrey Barrow, ‘The Pattern of Non-Literary Manuscript Production and Survival in Scotland,1200–1330’, in Richard Britnell, ed., Pragmatic Literacy, East and West 1200–1330,Woodbridge, 1997, 135.

38 LEGAL HISTORY

lands.63 The poor survival rate of records from the central courts of medieval

Scotland has made it difficult to document the extent to which land holders,

male and female, used the new procedures to establish and defend their

claims to land, revenues and privileges. Charter materials, however, once

again offer useful evidence here.

The confidence with which some women expressed their independent status

as land owners is particularly apparent in the preponderance in written deeds of

grants made ‘in lawful widowhood’ (in legittime viduitate). Thus, in the mid-

twelfth century Beatrix de Bello Campo included her son and heir in the

address clause of a charter in favour of Dryburgh abbey, but took care to

note that her grant was made in ‘my free widowhood’, and specifically in remis-

sion of her own sins.64 Around 1225 Margaret, daughter of Adam de Loccard

and a widow, sold her third in the toun of Stevenston in Ayrshire to Hugh de

Crawford.65 Several years later Alice de Gordon granted ‘in my lawful widow-

hood and moved by divine charity . . . all the lands, rents, easements, liberties,

rights and possessions that I received from my great-grandfather Richard, my

grandfather, Thomas and my father, Sir Thomas’ to Kelso abbey.66 In a grant

made in mea pura viduitate et legitima potestate Maud de Arnot identified

the estates she was granting to her second husband and the heirs of their

bodies as lands that she held in dower from her first spouse.67

Yet, as the thirteenth century progressed, legal convention increasingly

required that a charter include a clear and unequivocal statement of the

donor’s capacity to effect her gift, lest some family member challenge the

charter in future. Thus, if it was possible late in the reign of William I for a

deed of Eva de Quincy to note that her grant of 25 acres of arable land to

the Cistercian monks of Melrose abbey had been made merely ‘out of

charity’ or, similarly, for a charter of Helen de Morville, widow of Roland

of Galloway, from the same period to describe her gift of land to Melrose

in equally unencumbered language,68 or yet again for Ada, daughter of Earl

David of Huntingdon and wife of the Strathearn nobleman Mael Iosa, son

of Fearchar, to bestow lands on the brethren of Lindores abbey,69 such

63G.C.H. Paton, ed., An Introduction to Scottish Legal History, Stair Society, 1958, 12, 111–112;MacQueen, Common Law and Feudal Society, 24, 157, 173; Duncan, Making of the Kingdom,370.64Archibald C. Lawrie, ed., Early Scottish Charters Prior to A.D. 1153, Glasgow, 1905, no.219.Beatrix’s sins are also mentioned, ibid., no.238.65The grant is printed in Keith J. Stringer, ‘Periphery and Core in Thirteenth-Century Scotland:Alan of son of Roland, Lord of Galloway and Constable of Scotland’, in Grant and Stringer,eds., Medieval Scotland: Crown, Lordship and Community, Edinburgh, 1993, App., no.6.66Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.120.67NAS, GD 198/3, 4.68Melrose Liber, vol.1, nos.49, 82.69Lindores Cart., no.36.


simplicity was no longer acceptable just a generation later. In a charter dated

around 1230 the monk of Kelso abbey who drafted the document included a

statement identifying Ada de Courtenay, daughter of Patrick, earl of

Dunbar, specifically as a lawful widow, and thus legally capable of granting

them land in Home.70 So, too, did a brother of Coupar Angus abbey in a

deed of Isabella, countess of Atholl, c. 1231, a canon of Glasgow in charters

of Farbhlaidh and Mariota, the daughters of native lords in Lennox, and a

monk of Arbroath in a charter of Matilda, countess of Angus.71 By the

1240s the written deeds of women donors almost inevitably identify them

clearly as ‘lawful widows’ and thus announce to all who would have been

present at the granting of sasine their legal authority to alienate lands. Thus,

in a formal agreement dated 1277 with Sir Hugh de Abernethy concerning

her dower lands, Ethne, widow of Cristin, explicitly identified the estates as

belonging to her de iure et in assisa terre contingentes racione dicti domini

Critini mariti sui, nomine tercie partis sue.72 Such assertions were particularly

important in the year 1230, following the introduction of two new pleadable

brieves governing the recovery of lands unlawfully seized, when women

may have been ‘struggling to ensure rights of inheritance and terce against

reluctant lords and their heirs’.73

OTHER EXPRESSIONS OF WOMEN’S LEGAL AUTHORITY

Contemporary legal practice held that a widow’s terce should normally

include the property she had first brought to the marriage as tocher (marita-

gium); Ada de Courtenay, for example, specifically identified the lands in

Home that she gifted to Kelso as ‘part of my free maritagium’.74

A widow’s capacity to convey such lands as she wished had far-reaching

implications for the children born of the marriage, but also in the broader

context of the family’s long-term economic strategies, for the grant or sale

of these estates alienated them in perpetuity and extinguished all claims that

family members might have expected to exercise over them. The sometimes

conflicting ambitions of a donor and her family were necessarily of concern

70Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.129.71Coupar Angus Chrs., vol.1, no.39; Glasgow Reg., vol.1, nos.130, 177; Arbroath Liber, vol.1,no.49. For a similar grant by the countess of Angus in legittima viduitate to a lay recipient, seeFraser, Douglas, vol.3, no.284.72Fraser, Douglas, vol.3, no.7.73Hector L. MacQueen, ‘Canon Law, Custom and Legislation: Law in the Reign of Alexander II’,paper presented to the International Legal History Conference, University of Exeter, 2000. I wishto thank Professor MacQueen for his permission to cite this unpublished paper, portions of whichhave been published as ‘Expectations of the Law’ (see note 12 above).74Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.129. For a similar identification of maritagium lands, see Melrose Liber,vol.1, no.295 (late twelfth century).

40 LEGAL HISTORY

to the beneficiaries of the grant, who needed to ensure that their title to such

gifts would withstand future challenges. Twelfth-century Scottish charters

sometimes included a clause of malediction that accomplished this purpose.

When Orabilis, countess of Mar granted a davach of land in free and perpetual

alms to the religious of St. Andrews, her charter warned that if anyone in

future dared to contest or diminish her gift in any way ‘they will earn not

only my malediction but also that of God Almighty’.75 Such curses,

however, are rare by the closing years of the twelfth century. Unusual, too,

was the practice of seeking oaths on the part of a woman’s heirs that a

grant would be respected after the donor’s death, but the practice did not

die out altogether: Isabella, the wife of William de Riddel, was made to

swear an oath on the gospels coram probis hominibus that neither she nor

her heirs would challenge her gift of a bovate of land to Melrose abbey.76

By the early thirteenth century assurances that a grant would not be chal-

lenged were provided more frequently by including the names of heirs in

charter witness lists – an indication that they had been present at the ceremony

in which sasine was delivered – or by inserting into the deed a clause of war-

randice.77 But beneficiaries – especially ecclesiastical – sometimes sought

ironclad guarantees that their title to land granted by women would not

prove the stuff of legal challenges after a widow’s death. Around 1220

Matilda de la Rivere renounced all claims to a fishery that her son had

granted to Kelso abbey and promised solemnly on her behalf and those of

her heirs never to initiate a suit in respect of the property.78 When, around

the same time, Norman de Leynal made a grant to Coldstream of some of

his wife’s tocher lands, the nuns sought a confirmation of the gift in separate

charters issued by Annabella herself and her son and heir, Robert.79 A charter

of 1260 x 1270 notes that Marjory de Lascelles’s gift of an annual rent to the

Augustinian canons of Incholm was made in her lawful widowhood, but also

with the ‘assent and good will of Sir Alexander de Moravia, my son and

heir’.80 Around the same time, Emma de Berneville was made to include in

a charter to Kelso abbey a long clause promising under pain of excommunica-

tion that neither she nor her heirs would ever seek to overturn her grant ‘by

75St. Andrews Liber, 290–291.76Melrose Liber, vol. 1, no. 163. For similar oaths, see St. Andrews Liber, 285–286; Glasgow Reg.,vol.1, no.167; St. Andrews Liber, 285–286; Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.45; Moray Reg., no.130;Melrose Liber, vol.2, App. no.27.77A grantor’s obligation to protect tenants against future claims to alienated lands was well estab-lished by the late twelfth century, but clauses of warrandice do not begin to appear as regularfeatures of Scottish charters until the thirteenth. MacQueen, Common Law and Feudal Society,45–47.78Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.60.79Coldstream Cart., nos.5, 6.80Inchcolm Chrs., no.28.


machination or out of contrariness’.81 These examples suggest not only that

beneficiaries were prepared to go to great lengths to ensure title to a woman

donor’s gift, but also, if more implicitly than explicitly, that the increasing

sophistication of the laws governing real property in Scotland was allowing

greater scope for family members to challenge their mothers’ or step-

mothers’ rights to alienate land.

It has been argued that women only seldom appear as witnesses to the

grants, quitclaims or sales recorded in written charters.82 That this should

have been the case is hardly surprising: women’s legal capacities in those

aspects of Scots law that were modelled on English practice were severely

restricted. Outside the burghs women had little place in the courts and assem-

blies where the symbolic granting of titles to land was enacted in formal and

highly ritualized ceremonies, and they had increasingly few opportunities

within a marriage to act independently. In Anglo-Norman law, then, the

weight of their opinion as attestors to a formal grant counted for little. This

was not always and everywhere the case, and a search through a select

group of printed charters allowed Geoffrey Barrow to list several instances

in which women’s names were included in charter witness lists, among

them the two daughters of the Anglian lady Eschina de Londres, Maud,

wife of William de Vieuxpont, and Avice of Lancaster.83 Here again,

however, surviving evidence is open to more than one interpretation.

Among the highest social groups, and particularly in the native lordships situ-

ated in the heart of old Scotia north of Forth, it was still possible in the twelfth

and early thirteenth centuries to acknowledge formally the authority of

women, and more especially to demonstrate respect for their high status

within landed society. This was the case not merely when the woman in ques-

tion was of Gaelic origin, but more generally, too, when alliances introduced

marriage partners of Anglo-Norman descent into native territory. Thus, Earl

Gillebrıghde of Strathearn was content to include among the witness lists of

some of his charters not merely his Gaelic-speaking wife Iseulte, but occasion-

ally his daughters, too.84 In the later twelfth century Countess Ela of Fife

included in a list of attestors of one of her charters her neighbour, Maud

D’Aubigny, Gillebrıghde’s first wife.85 Two charters of Agnes, countess of

Mar to the brethren of St. Andrews were attested by women of high rank,

including the countess of Fife and Ada de Warenne, the mother of Kings

81Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.45.82G.W.S. Barrow, ‘Witnesses and the Attestation of Formal Documents in Scotland, Twelfth-Thirteenth Centuries’, 16 Journal of Legal History (1995), 8.83Barrow, ‘Witnesses’, 8. See also Kelso Liber, vol.1, 178, where Margaret, the wife of Bernardson of Brieu, lord of Hadden, witnessed one of her husband’s charters c. 1200.84Inchaff. Chrs., nos.1–4, 7, 12–14, 25, 28.85Dunfermline Reg., no.153.

42 LEGAL HISTORY

William I and Mael Coluim IV.86 One of Ada’s charters likewise included the

name of her kinswoman Ela of Fife, and when monks at St. Andrews and

Kelso recorded two grants of land to their respective houses by the Anglo-

Norman lord Richard Comyn and the Gaelic magnate Mael Coluim, earl of

Atholl, both took care to note among the witnesses to the ceremonies of

gift giving the presence of the important Gaelic lady Hextilda, daughter of

Uhtred of Galloway.87 Orabilis, countess of Mar issued a written deed

which stated boldly that ‘I was present when my father Ness son of

William gave the church of Leuchars to God, the church of St. Andrew the

Apostle and the canons serving there’.88 The weight that Gaelic custom

accorded to native women’s testimony, however, was beginning to come

under siege in the early thirteenth century as Anglo-Norman legal principles

increasingly came to govern the conveyancing practices of the land-holding

ranks. There is little doubt that more recent thinking triumphed here, and it

is rare indeed to find a woman named as witness in a charter of any kind

after 1250.

That women’s opinion still counted for something is none the less apparent

in charters issued by women in which the donor included unusual details

describing the circumstances under which she made her grant. In 1259, for

example, Elena de Croc, a tenant of Earl Maeldomhnaich of Lennox, corrobo-

rated her husband’s account of the sale of a carucate of family land to a local

cleric before a royal inquest.89 In 1316 the abbot and convent of Melrose

sought to defend their title to the parish church of Ochiltree.90 Chief among

the witnesses they called in support of their claim was Eustacia de Colville,

lady of Ochiltree and widow of Sir Reginald le Chen. Eustacia had no

trouble confirming the abbey’s title. She recounted in scrupulous detail the cir-

cumstances under which her grandfather had apportioned descent of the

barony and the advowson of the church, and recalled the several suits by

which her grandfather’s brothers and sisters had tried to secure one or other

portions of the estate; she listed also the names of the several rectors who

had been appointed to the church while she herself had held its patronage.

The scribes in the employ of Melrose abbey carefully copied down Eustacia’s

recollections, and the bishop of Glasgow confirmed the Cistercian house’s title

to the church. Half a century later Isabella, countess of Fife described in some

detail the legal settlement in which James Douglas, lord of Dalkeith had been

awarded title to some lands in Fife during her father’s lifetime.91 Women’s

86St. Andrews Liber, 249–250.87St. Andrews Liber, 207–208, 246; Kelso Liber, 226.88St. Andrews Liber, 287–288.89NAS, RH 5/21.90Melrose Liber, vol.2, no.400.91Morton Reg., vol.2, nos.102–4.


roles as repositories of family history could be – and were – deployed as

useful tools in the increasingly complex world of thirteenth- and fourteenth-

century litigation and conveyancing.

WOMEN’S AUTHORITY AS EXPRESSED IN SEALS

A woman’s legal personhood was most visibly symbolized not in the parch-

ment sheets on which male scribes recorded her grants, but in the possession

of a seal in her own name, and seals offer as intriguing evidence of Scottish

women’s ideas about their place in land-holding society as do the texts of

the documents they authenticated. From the twelfth century seals had begun

to proliferate among women of the landed ranks not only in France, but in

England as well.92 In Scotland men of noble rank were imitating the style

of royal seals in the eleventh century, and in the course of the twelfth began

to imprint on them a wide variety of distinctive devices. Women’s seals

also began to appear here in the twelfth century and became increasingly

popular in the thirteenth.

Mentions of women’s seals in grants datable to the period before 1200 are

infrequent; thus, in two early grants to Dunfermline abbey Marjory, the wife of

Michael Scot, authenticated her actions instead with a ring.93 But they were

not unheard of. A charter of c. 1147 to Kelso abbey by Maria, wife of

Walter de Forgrund, included a seal;94 so, too, did the deeds that recorded

grants by women as widely separated in social ranks as Petronella, daughter

of Adam, c. 1170 and Orabilis of Mar, 117x199.95 By contrast, when

around 1160 William de Wallace and his wife Isabella, heiress of Robert

‘called Foubert’, granted some lands to Melrose abbey their charter included

no sealing clause, but appended to the document were two seals, one belong-

ing to William, the other to Isabella.96 The daughter of a native land holder in

Borthwick had her own seal c. 1170, as did Avicia, the wife of Richard de

Morville, Constable of Scotland.97 Christina de Coldingham had more than

92Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, ‘Women, Seals, and Power in Medieval France, 1150–1350’, in MaryErler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds., Women and Power in the Middle Ages, Athens, GA,1988, 61–82; Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, ‘Medieval Women in French Sigillographic Sources’, inJ.T. Rosenthal, ed., Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History, Athens, GA, 1990,1–36; P.D.A. Harvey. ‘Personal Seals in Thirteenth-Century England’, in Church and Chroniclein the Middle Ages: Essays presented to John Taylor, London, 1991, 117–127.93Dunfermline Reg., nos.174, 175.94Kelso Liber, vol.1, no.31.95Melrose Liber, vol.1, no.267; St Andrews Liber, 287–288.96Melrose Liber, vol.1, no.64; J.H. Stevenson and M. Wood, Scottish Heraldic Seals, 3 vols.,Glasgow, 1940, vol.3, 639.97Melrose Liber, vol.1, nos.108, 267. For other early examples of women’s seals, seeJ.H. Stevenson and M. Wood, Scottish Heraldic Seals, 3 vols., Glasgow, 1940, vol.2, 224(Margaret Adam), 284 (Marion Chirnside).

44 LEGAL HISTORY

one seal, one she used as the widow of Constantine of Coldingham, the other

as wife of her second husband.98

These examples represent little more than anecdotal material, and there

remains to be done a great deal of research on the use of personal seals by

medieval Scottish women. Nevertheless, a survey of surviving matrices and

the detailed descriptions of seals published early last century99 make it poss-

ible to draw some tentative conclusions and to posit areas for further study. A

first observation concerns the comparatively early date at which women’s

seals begin to appear in written deeds of women donors in Scotland, especially

those who lived in the kingdom’s burghs. Many of the examples cited above

relate to grants of lands, tenements and privileges by townswomen. The work

of legal scholars and of social historians has shown that, as was the case in

England, Scottish town air was ‘freer’ than that of the countryside, and

women’s legal capacities were more extensive within the burghs than they

were in the rural setting. As traders, small business people, renters, lessees

and property owners in burghs as widely scattered as Aberdeen, Glasgow

and Berwick, women had strong incentives to give expression to their legal

capacities in clear and unambiguous terms. Inclusion of their names in

charter witness lists went some way towards serving this need, but possession

of a seal made it possible for them to assume a legal identity that accorded

weight to their status as free land holders rather than to their gender.

A second trend apparent from a study of the charters is that from a very

early date heiresses and widows were especially likely to commission their

own seals. Here again, an explanation may lie in the peculiarities of Scottish

legal developments of the thirteenth century. Until about 1230 sealing clauses

are unusual in women’s charters; rarer still is the survival of waxen seals

impressed with their own symbols. Thereafter, however, the clauses quickly

become regular features of the standard charter style and seals appear with

regularity. In fact, it becomes highly unusual for a woman granting a

charter to admit, as had Maria de Forgrund in her gift to Kelso abbey noted

above, and Iseulte of Strathearn in 1221, that her seal is not well known, or

to depend on the authority of men of higher rank and status, as did Goda

of Aberdeen as late as 1247, in an agreement with the priory of St.

Andrews.100 Here again, there is good reason to posit a link between these

developments and legislation introduced by King Alexander II. Scholars

have argued that the origins of the pleadable brieves of novel dissasine, mor-

tancestry, right and especially terce lie in part in the demand among land-

holding women for procedures that would protect their claims to dower and

98Stevenson and Wood, Scottish Heraldic Seals, vol.2, 289.99Ibid.; also J.H. Stevenson, Heraldry in Scotland, 2 vols., Glasgow, 1914.100NLS, Adv. MS. 15.1.18, no.37.


their authority to alienate such estates.101 In a period of intense social, legal

and cultural change, however, when European influences were as yet compet-

ing with tenacious customary practices of the Gaelic past, there were no hard

and fast rules governing possession of a seal by either men or women. Earl

Gillebrıghde of Strathearn’s first wife, Maud D’Aubigny, for example, was

the daughter of a prominent English aristocrat of Anglo-Norman descent,

and, presumably well versed in the latest diplomatic conventions of

Angevin England, felt no need to own a seal of her own. Although she is

clearly identified as co-founder with her husband in the charter that established

the priory of Inchaffray on the couple’s lands, the original parchment sheet

includes only one seal tag and one seal, that of her husband.102 Her successor

as countess, a woman of native background, however, did commission one.

Early thirteenth-century beneficiaries were not always convinced that a

woman’s seal alone endowed a charter with sufficient gravitas or her grant

with trustworthy authority. A grant of Helen, daughter of Alan of Galloway

(no mean land holder himself), to the see of Glasgow included not only her

own seal, but those of Bishop William of Glasgow and Prior Henry of St.

Andrews.103 Similarly, a charter of Richenda, widow of Robert son of Warne-

bald, issued in favour of Arbroath abbey in 1245, was sealed not only by the

woman herself but by the bishop of Aberdeen and another senior cleric;104 that

of Agnes, wife of Laurence de Ylverstoun, with her own seal and that of her

husband.105 It was not until the middle years of the thirteenth century, in fact,

that women’s possession of seals and their authority to use them to authenti-

cate their deeds became so widely recognized as to obviate the need for

additional (male) confirmation. The proliferation of women’s seals was in

turn followed by developments in seal styles and in the ways in which

women used these materials to express themselves.

Although Scottish women used small round seals, they favoured pointed

oval shapes. The symbols depicted on them varied widely. As was the case

in England, it was not unusual for women to adopt a variation of the images

found on their husband’s seal. Countess Isabel of Gloucester, for example,

reproduced on the reverse of her seal the helmeted bust, the two figures of

the goddess Nike, and the eagle that appeared on her husband’s device.106

Although she was the daughter and co-heiress of Roger de Quincy, Constable

of Scotland, Elena de la Zouche chose to depict the arms of her English

101MacQueen, Common Law and Feudal Society, 174, 225; Duncan, Making of the Kingdom, 372.102For a facsimile of the foundation charter, see Inchaffray Chrs., Facsimile no.4.103Glasgow Reg., vol.1, no.167.104Arbroath Liber, vol.1, no.263.105Stevenson and Wood, Scottish Heraldic Seals, Vol. 2, 426.106Robert B. Patterson, Earldom of Gloucester Charters: The Charters and Scribes of the Earlsand Countesses of Gloucester to A.D. 1217, Oxford, 1973, 24.

46 LEGAL HISTORY

husband on her seal.107 Sometimes, however, a woman chose the symbols of

her own family over those of her husband, an indication in Scotland, as else-

where, that her status was higher than that of her spouse and her family of

greater social consequence. Thus, the seal of Muriel, daughter of Conghal

of Strathearn, displayed prominently the two chevronells of her kinsman,

Earl Mael Iosa II of Strathearn;108 similarly, that of Elizabeth Bisset, who

retained her own family’s name throughout her marriage, was marked with

the arms of the ‘most noble man, Sir John Bisset, her father’.109 On still

other occasions a woman combined the pictorial symbols of her family with

those of her husband to create a seal unique to her: that of Lady Margaret

Bruce, wife of Sir Robert de Ros of Wark, for example, combined the heraldic

shields of the families of Bruce and Ros together with the device of a robed

woman that featured on many female seals of the thirteenth century.110 Simi-

larly, Devorguilla, the daughter of Alan of Galloway, Constable of Scotland

and wife of John Balliol, created an original visual representation of her

person in a seal, the obverse of which portrayed a woman dressed in a long

robe, standing on a corbel and holding shields bearing the arms of the families

of Galloway and Balliol; below her, two other shields represented her English

ancestry among the noble households of Chester and Huntingdon. These arms

appeared again on the reverse of the seal.111 More unusually, women of high

rank sometimes heralded their status not only on their own seals, but through

the use of evocative imagery on their husband’s seal as well. Most notable in

this respect was the seal of Adam de Kilconquhar, a cadet member of the

native Fife family who rose virtually overnight to prominence in Scottish

society when he married Marjorie, the only daughter and heiress of the earl

of Carrick. Adam’s seal depicts a lady dressed in flowing garments holding

in her left hand a pennon, and with her right presenting a shield to an

armed knight on horseback; he extends both his arms to receive it. The

shield itself bears the arms of the earldom of Carrick, and these are repeated

on the horse’s caparisons.112 No one who saw Adam’s seal could fail to read

its message: Marjorie had ‘made’ her husband both a knight and an earl.113

107Stevenson and Wood, Scottish Heraldic Seals, vol.3, 550.108Stevenson and Wood, Scottish Heraldic Seals, vol.3, 626. Earl Mael Iosa I’s seals are discussedin C.J. Neville, ‘The Earls of Strathearn from the Twelfth to the Mid-fourteenth Century, withan Edition of their Written Acts’, 2 vols., submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, 1983, vol.1, 342.109Stevenson and Wood, Scottish Heraldic Seals, vol.2, 248, no.366.110Stevenson and Wood, Scottish Heraldic Seals, vol.2, 262.111Stevenson and Wood, Scottish Heraldic Seals, vol.2, 368; George Henderson, ‘Romance andPolitics on some Medieval English Seals’, 1 Art History (1978), 36. Other Scottish examplesare discussed in Stevenson, Heraldry in Scotland, vol.1, 149–152, 158–160.112Stevenson and Wood, Scottish Heraldic Seals, vol.2, 441.113It is all the more interesting, then, that after Adam’s death and her second marriage to Sir RobertBruce lord of Annandale, Marjorie should have abandoned on her own seal the earlier device of


The symbols that women chose to engrave on seal matrices were the stuff

of neither flight nor fancy. In the late twelfth century Petronella ‘Harang’ gave

visual representation to her family name when she adopted a pattern of her-

rings for her seal; so, too, did Alice Ferrars, 100 years later, when she chose

for her seal the device of a hammer and horseshoe.114 Farbhlaidh, countess

of Angus had a thoughtful metaphor in mind now, alas, lost, when she directed

that a craftsman create for her a seal depicting an effigy of a woman holding a

shepherd’s staff.115 The extensive research of Brigitte Bedos-Rezak into a

range of aspects concerning sigillographic practice on the Continent has

enabled her to argue convincingly that ‘[s]eals had specific processes of sig-

nifying which functioned within the larger socio-cultural semantic code’ of

the later medieval period.116 Waxen seals, she further posits, ‘accompanied,

indeed articulated, the assertion of personal identity’,117 and imparted to

their owners both presence and authority even in the latter’s absence.

These arguments are of particular relevance to the study of Scottish

women’s seal devices. Seals were visual and tangible representations of a

woman’s understanding of her place in Scottish land-holding society. In a

very physical way, the symbols with which they were marked juxtaposed

the woman’s roles as both a representative of her ancestral house and, as a con-

sequence of her marriage, the founder of a new dynastic branch. Seals were in

this sense tangible manifestations of the continuity between past, present and

future. They fulfilled, albeit in a distinct way, the same function as clauses of

commemoration in reminding all who saw, handled and interpreted them that

the donor occupied a meaningful and identifiable place within the context of a

clearly defined lineage.

A final observation relates to the precise period during which women’s

seals begin to proliferate on Scottish documents. As noted above, the early

thirteenth century in particular was a period of rapid development in Scots

law. It culminated in the issue in 1230 of a series of royal statutes that set

out the procedures by which Scottish land holders should in future pursue

claims to landed property, themselves the manifestation of an ongoing

struggle on the part of the Scottish crown with both the church and its own

magnates for ‘exclusive jurisdiction within the realm in relation to secular

cinquefoils peculiar to Carrick, and remodelled the seal to include only Bruce’s arms. Clearly, sheconsidered Bruce’s dynastic origins at least the equal of, if not more exalted than, her own.114Stevenson and Wood, Scottish Heraldic Seals, vol.2, 354, 398.115Coupar Angus Chrs., vol.1, 119.116Brigitte M. Bedos-Rezak, ‘Towns and Seals. Representation and Signification in MedievalFrance’, 72 Bulletin of the John Rylands Library (1990), 35. More generally, see MichaelClanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn., Oxford, 1993,308–317.117Brigitte M. Bedos-Rezak, ‘Medieval Identity: A Sign and a Concept’, 105 American HistoricalReview (2000), 1492.

48 LEGAL HISTORY

land’.118 With widespread recourse to brieves of novel dissasine, mortancestry

and especially terce, control over the form and process by which donors quit-

claimed their titles to lands, made grants in feu and heritage, and gifted estates

to the church in free alms assumed increasingly urgency in the determination

of rival or questionable claims to lands and privileges. The right of some

women to alienate property, their title to dower estates, and widows’ disposi-

tion of former tocher lands thus became part and parcel of the growing import-

ance of written proof within the nascent common law of Scotland. The

uncertainty of women’s place in the land-holding hierarchy was gradually

eroded in the century or so after 1230 and challenges to women’s authority

to alienate land on the basis of their gender alone became increasingly rare.

One indication of the changing legal tenor of the times was women’s confident

use of their own uniquely designed seals. If, in 1233, the bishop of Glasgow

might insist that the quitclaim of the toun of Eddleston by Helen, eldest

daughter and co-heiress of Alan of Galloway, be reinforced by an oath

sworn on the gospels and the addition of the seals of two senior prelates to

her own, his concern was as much a reflection of official mistrust of the inde-

pendence with which the lords of Galloway had traditionally flouted royal and

ecclesiastical commands as it was anxiety about the lady’s authority to act in

the matter. Just a few decades later such conservatism was on the way out. By

then, most women wielded their seals with some confidence and only

occasionally felt the need to corroborate their actions by seeking confirmation

from male relatives and acquaintances.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHURCH ON WOMEN’S LEGAL

AUTHORITY

The common law of Scotland did not, of course, develop in a vacuum. If, in the

thirteenth century, its procedures and practices owed much to English models

developed during the so-called ‘revolution of justice’ of the Angevin period,

so, too, did its jurisprudence reflect the powerful influence of a reforming

church. In the reign of David I the Scottish church experienced the beginning

of a ‘thoroughgoing transformation’119 which, in the course of the succeeding

100 years, left no aspect of the political, social or cultural life of the kingdom

untouched. In the sphere of the law, papal efforts to make good the claims of

Rome to primacy over a broad range of spiritual and secular affairs caused no

little tension, notably in respect of the appropriation and patronage of hun-

dreds of newly established parish churches both north and south of Forth.

Problems also arose when a powerful succession of archbishops of Canterbury

118MacQueen, ‘Expectations of the Law’, 289.119G.W.S. Barrow, Kingship and Unity: Scotland 1000–1306, Edinburgh, 1981, 62.


and York sought to impose their respective jurisdictions over Scottish bishops

and their sees.120 In the early years of the thirteenth century, although the

canon lawyers had secured widespread recognition of the church’s authority

to decide questions of marriage and legitimacy, there was nevertheless con-

siderable competition between the secular and ecclesiastical courts for cogni-

zance of suits arising from such matters, especially disputes that touched

on teinds, mortuary gifts, and titles to land based on the marital status of

one party or another. The medieval popes gave forceful expression to their

reform agenda when they welcomed appeals to the papal curia and appointed

throughout the realm legates empowered to render definitive judgments in a

host of disputes, many of them of immediate relevance to both pope and

king. Scholars have differed in their assessments of which of the two

powers, secular or ecclesiastical, emerged victorious from the struggle for

jurisdiction, but recent treatment of the subject stresses fruitful cooperation

rather than overt antagonism between the church and the crown in the devel-

opment of the common law. Although by 1200 fully committed to policies

designed to secure royal control over matters relating to the tenure of land,

Scottish kings nevertheless drew considerable inspiration from the legislative

reform programme of contemporary Rome.121

In Scotland, as in Europe generally, the conservative tenor of the ecclesias-

tical reform movement had a profound impact on the status and position of

women. Bishops intent on remedying the moral laxity of the native population

began actively to legislate against irregular marriage customs among the

Gaelic-speaking nobility,122 and in the thirteenth century even disputes

between lay persons centred on questions of legitimacy and inheritance

might come under the watchful scrutiny of reform-minded judges-delegate.123

In Scotland, then, the church’s firm assumption of responsibility over the spiri-

tual health and well-being of secular society played a formative part in shaping

and ultimately limiting the rights that women would play in land-holding

society. The changing nature of ecclesiastical authority had particularly

important implications within the Gaelic territories of the kingdom. In the

first half of the twelfth century alone problems over the succession to no

120These struggles are amply reviewed in Duncan, Making of the Kingdom, chs.10 and 11; andGordon Donaldson, Scottish Church History, Edinburgh, 1985, 40–45. A number of specificcases involving rival secular and ecclesiastical claims to jurisdiction are discussed in T.M.Cooper, Select Scottish Cases of the Thirteenth Century, Edinburgh, 1944.121MacQueen, ‘Expectations of the Law’, 286–290.122W.D.H. Sellar, ‘Marriage, Divorce and Concubinage in Gaelic Scotland’, 51 Transactionsof the Gaelic Society of Inverness (1978–80), 474–477; Paul C. Ferguson, Medieval PapalRepresentatives in Scotland: Legates, Nuncios, and Judges-delegate, 1125–1286, Stair Soc.,1997, 157–158; A.E. Anton, ‘“Handfasting” in Scotland’, 37 Scottish Historical Review(1958), 89–102.123Ferguson, Medieval Papal Representative, 158–159.

50 LEGAL HISTORY

fewer than four of the ancient earldoms (Atholl, Moray, Menteith and Caith-

ness)124 bore witness to the uneasy opinions of churchmen about the validity

of Gaelic marriage customs. More subtly, and more onerously, these cases

betrayed official concerns about the legal capacity of native women in the chan-

ging world of inheritance and land ownership. Women in the ancient lordships

north of Forth, then, experienced two distinct but related kinds of pressure, the

effect of each of which was to restrict their rights in land; first, the limitations

that the growing influence of Anglo-Norman legal practice imposed on all

women throughout Scotland and, second, the prejudices of an ecclesiastical

establishment intent on marginalizing native cultural and religious expression.

CONCLUSION

The distinctive nature of the evidence that survives from north of Forth offers

tantalizing support for the argument that Anglo-Norman legal innovations by

no means ‘swept aside’ Gaelic custom.125 Indeed, for a while at least, the pro-

liferation of written deeds and of the seals that authenticated them may have

provided native women with greater opportunities than they had known before

1150 to assert property rights that custom accorded them.

Nevertheless, Scotland’s continued exposure to the influences of Europea-

nization in the thirteenth century steadily circumscribed the freedom of

women, native and newcomer, to dispose freely of their estates. Some few

opportunities did remain for them to give expression to their status as

members of the land-holding elite, and in the year 1300 women were much

more likely to have their intentions as donors and alienors respected than

they had been a century earlier. The written charter, moreover, remained

throughout the later medieval period an important legal instrument and a

secure means for women as well as men to convey to all concerned that

donors were ‘thinking ahead to a time when they would not themselves be

alive to control how their dispositions fared’.126 In adopting, from an early

period, the charter form and the sealing, testing, witness and warrandice

clauses that were integral parts of the written deed, women consciously and

forcefully gave expression to their place in the land-holding hierarchy of

medieval Scotland. In eventually according their written documents the

same authority and respect with which they treated the deeds of male

donors, beneficiaries demonstrated their own acceptance of these claims.

124Duncan, Making of the Kingdom,178–179, 193; G.W.S. Barrow, ‘The Reign of William theLion’, in Barrow, Scotland and its Neighbours, 80–81; Barbara E. Crawford, ‘The Earldom ofCaithness and the Kingdom of Scotland 1150–1266’, in K.J. Stringer, ed., Essays on the Nobilityof Medieval Scotland, Edinburgh, 1985, 33–37.125MacQueen, Common Law and Feudal Society, 86.126Paul R. Hyams, ‘The Charter as a Source for the Early Common Law’, 12 Journal of LegalHistory (1991), 175.


APPENDIX

LIST OF CARTULARY SOURCES CONSULTED

Aberdeen-Banff Ill. ¼ Illustrations of the Topography and Antiquities of the

Shires of Aberdeen and Banff, ed. G. Grub, 4 vols., Spalding Club,

1857–69.

Arbroath Liber ¼ Liber S. Thome de Aberbrothoc, ed. C. Innes and

P. Chalmers, 2 vols., Bannatyne Club, 1848–56.

Cambuskenneth Reg. ¼ Registrum Monasterii S. Marie de Cambuskenneth,

ed. W. Fraser, Grampian Club, 1872.

Coldstream Cart. ¼ Chartulary of the Cistercian Priory of Coldstream, ed.

C. Rogers, Grampian Club, 1879.

Coupar Angus Chrs. ¼ Charters of the Abbey of Coupar Angus, ed. D.E.

Easson, Scottish History Society, 1947.

Dryburgh Liber ¼ Liber S. Marie de Dryburgh, ed. W. Fraser, Bannatyne

Club, 1847.

Dunfermline Reg. ¼ Registrum de Dunfermelyn, ed. C. Innes, Bannatyne

Club, 1842.

Family of Rose of Carlaverock ¼ A Genealogical Deduction of the Family of

Rose of Kilravock, ed. C. Innes, Spalding Club, 1848.

Fraser, Buccleuch ¼ The Scotts of Buccleuch, ed. W. Fraser, 2 vols.,

Edinburgh, 1878.

Fraser, Carlaverock ¼ The Red Book of Carlaverock, ed. W. Fraser, 2 vols.,

Edinburgh, 1873.

Fraser, Colquhoun ¼ The Chiefs of Colquhoun, ed. W. Fraser, 2 vols.,

Edinburgh, 1869.

Fraser, Cromartie ¼ The Earls of Cromartie, ed, W. Fraser, 2 vols.,

Edinburgh, 1876.

Fraser, Douglas ¼ The Douglas Book, ed. W. Fraser, 4 vols., Edinburgh,

1885.

Fraser, Eglinton ¼ Memorials of the Montgomeries Earls of Eglinton, ed.

W. Fraser, 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1859.

Fraser, Elphinstone ¼ The Elphinstone Family, ed. W. Fraser, 2 vols.,

Edinburgh, 1897.

Fraser, Grandtully ¼ The Red Book of Grandtully, ed. W. Fraser, 2 vols.,

Edinburgh, 1868.

Fraser, Grant ¼ The Chiefs of Grant, ed. W. Fraser, 3 vols., Edinburgh, 1883.

Fraser, Haddington ¼ Memorials of the Earls of Haddington, ed. W. Fraser, 2

vols., Edinburgh, 1889.

Fraser, Lennox ¼ The Lennox, ed. W. Fraser, 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1874.

Fraser, Melville ¼ The Melvilles Earls of Melville and the Leslies Earls of

Leven, ed. W. Fraser, 3 vols., Edinburgh, 1890.

52 LEGAL HISTORY

Fraser, Pollock Cart. ¼ The Cartulary of Pollock-Maxwell, ed. W. Fraser,

Edinburgh, 1875.

Fraser, Menteith ¼ The Red Book of Menteith, ed. W. Fraser, 2 vols.,

Edinburgh, 1880.

Fraser, Southesk ¼ History of the Carnegies, Earls of Southesk, and of their

Kindred, ed. W. Fraser, 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1867.

Fraser, Sutherland ¼ The Sutherland Book, ed. W. Fraser, 3 vols., Edinburgh,

1892.

Fraser, Wemyss ¼ Memorials of the Family of Wemyss of Wemyss, ed.

W. Fraser, 3 vols., Edinburgh, 1888.

Frasers of Philorth ¼ The Frasers of Philorth, ed. A.F. Saltoun, 3 vols.,

Edinburgh, 1879.

Glasgow Reg. ¼ Registrum Episcopatus Glasguensis, ed. C. Innes, Bannatyne

and Maitland Clubs, 1845.

Inchaffray Chrs. ¼ Charters, Bulls and other documents relating to the Abbey

of Inchaffray, ed. W.A. Lindsay, J. Dowden and J. Maitland Thomson,

Scottish History Society, 1908.

Inchaffray Liber ¼ Liber Insule Missarum, ed. C. Innes, Bannatyne Club,

1847.

Inchcolm Chrs. ¼ Charters of the Abbey of Inchcolm, ed. D.E. Easson and

A. Macdonald, Scottish History Society, 1938.

Kelso Liber ¼ Liber S. Marie de Clachou, ed. C. Innes, 2 vols., Bannatyne

Club, 1846.

Lennox Cart ¼ Cartularium Comitatus de Levenax, ed. J. Dennistoun,

Maitland Club, 1833.

Lindores Cart. ¼ Chartulary of the Abbey of Lindores, 1195–1479, ed.

J. Dowden, Scottish History Society, 1903.

Melrose Liber ¼ Liber Sancte Marie de Melros, ed. C. Innes, 2 vols.,

Bannatyne Club, 1837.

Moray Reg. ¼ Registrum Episcopatus Moraviensis, ed. C. Innes, Bannatyne

Club, 1837.

Morton Reg. ¼ Registrum Honoris de Morton, ed. T. Thomson, A. Macdonald

and C. Innes, 2 vols., Bannatyne Club, 1853.

Newbattle Reg. ¼ Registrum S. Marie de Neubotle, ed. C. Innes, Bannatyne

Club, 1849.

North Berwick Carte ¼ Carte Monialium de Northberwic, ed. C. Innes,

Bannatyne Club, 1847.

St. Andrews Liber ¼ Liber Cartarum Prioratus Sancti Andree in Scotia, ed.

T. Thomson, Bannatyne Club, 1841.

Scone Liber ¼ Liber Ecclesie de Scon, ed. W. Smythe, Bannatyne Club, 1843.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to acknowledge with thanks the financial support of the

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and of the

Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland in the research undertaken

for this article.

54 LEGAL HISTORY