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.
WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 29
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.
WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 31
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.
WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 33
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
WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 35
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.
WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 37
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.
WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 39
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.
WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 41
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.
WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 43
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.
WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 45
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
WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 47
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.
WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 49
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.
WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 51
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.
WOMEN AND LAND OWNERSHIP IN SCOTLAND, 1150 – 1350 53
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