Thomas Brochard
Honorary Research Fellow in History, University of St Andrews.
I specialize in early-modern Scotland and particularly the northern Highlands and have published extensively on that topic, covering various aspects of that region: governance, culture, trade, migration, witchcraft, education, networks, the legal environment, and plantation.
In parallel, my other area of investigation concerns more broadly Scots in Europe and their networks using alba amicorum (or friendship albums) from the 1540s to the 1730s, spread across British, European, North-American, and Russian archives, libraries, museums and other institutions, as well as private collections, consulted on-site or through digital copies.
I specialize in early-modern Scotland and particularly the northern Highlands and have published extensively on that topic, covering various aspects of that region: governance, culture, trade, migration, witchcraft, education, networks, the legal environment, and plantation.
In parallel, my other area of investigation concerns more broadly Scots in Europe and their networks using alba amicorum (or friendship albums) from the 1540s to the 1730s, spread across British, European, North-American, and Russian archives, libraries, museums and other institutions, as well as private collections, consulted on-site or through digital copies.
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Books by Thomas Brochard
Copies of the booklet are available at Inverness Library, the University of St Andrews Library, in the National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh), and (in due time) the British Library (London).
Within the field of interpersonal violence, the duel still fascinates historians. However, within the Scottish context, this extreme form of fight has not yet been properly investigated, except in its judicial cadre or in a few case studies. The topic is usually approached from the perspective of honour or from within the context of feuding. Whilst the number of clan chiefs was relatively low, the duel found uptake among a broader section of clan gentry who aspired to attain honourable status, given its significance within their value system. Expanding on the exploration of Scottish nobles’ honour, this multifaceted and adaptable form of fighting honour was present in the country’s outlying territories in a modest way. Its presence within Highland clanship highlights the wide social and geographical dimension of the duel.
The present volume aims to help construct a national picture of duelling in Scotland, as already exists for much of Europe, positioning duelling in relation to the notions of honour and blood feud. In addition, these affairs of honour have very rarely – if at all – been examined from a regional perspective. Such an approach not only reveals interesting aspects about the duel per se but also sets the topic within the wider dynamic of state formation and identity.
In a sense, the evolution of the duel and of its corollary honour did not follow a linear progression from uncontrolled human passions to controlled ones. Nor was it restricted to a binary development from duel or honour to civility. Societal, cultural, and behavioural factors generally accounted for the relative absence of duels in the Scottish northern Highlands and Highlands, partly due to the nature of Scottish clanship and its modus operandi. This is not to say that this was a prerequisite for the absence of duelling. The duel did not constitute a habitus of the clan gentry nor a carrier of their identity, which was even more pronounced in the area’s west coast and islands as locals did not engage in single combats. They took a different approach to redress affronts to honour with a greater combined emphasis on the collective at both a conceptual (collective liability) and processual (blood feud and arbitration) level.
Despite the popular dichotomy driving a wedge between the Lowlands and the Highlands, this study has highlighted many similarities found between the Highland élite and Lowland nobility in the strategies and alternatives used to defend one’s honour and in the common aspirations towards Crown honours and titles and official positions.
Furthermore, the pattern of the duel has ramifications for this perceived geographically peripheral society in terms of the so-called ‘civilizing’ process. The duel contributed to state formation and the integration of these northern Highlanders within wider Scottish and British society. This, ironically, resulted in duelling denoting a measure of civility in the integration of these northern duellists within the kingdom and Europe at large. The duel represented the modest diffusion of Renaissance and Baroque ideals in terms of the assertion of the self. It can also be seen as a component in the (non-linear) evolution towards commercialism and towards honour as a service to the Crown rather than the personal use of violence. Indeed, the clan élite of the northern Highlands accepted State honours and entered Crown service, somehow clothing themselves with these external symbols of honour, whilst still adhering to a more internalized sense of honour inherited from the kindred and lineage. These were not necessarily competing systems of honour but rather parallel or complementary ones. Yet when the civil wars broke out, a number of these clan élites abandoned honourable service to the monarchy, a temporal form of honour, to focus on kindred and lineage, an intemporal one, refined by a humanist and religious critique. By doing so, the clan élite loosened the bond between honour and violence whilst maintaining martial valour.
The history of the duel in Scotland is yet to be written, but it might well be that with the transition from clan conflict to military service (seen as a nursery for valorous men) on behalf of the Crown, this adaptation and transposition of masculine honour based in part on martial identity from one collective entity (the clan) to another (the Highland regiment) played a role in checking the growth of the duel in the Scottish Highlands. Indeed, instances of individual honour do not seem to have seriously compromised the collective imperative, which prevailed as long as Gaelic society in Scotland remained clan-based, and even beyond given that the collective clan base survived the decline of blood feud. These preliminary foundations enable subsequent analyses of the duel in the Scottish Highlands for the eighteenth century onwards and establish markers for an overall study of the duel in Scotland.
Notaries routinely dealt with intimate family and private matters. These fascinating historical figures crossed political, judicial, socio-economic, and cultural divides as part of their work. But despite their evident importance in Scottish society, they have been little studied.
The booklet explores for the first time the provision and role of notaries – touching briefly on other legal personnel – in the northern Highlands, namely the shires of Ross, Sutherland, Caithness and the Outer Hebrides in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and compares the situation there with that prevailing in other parts of Scotland and, in a limited capacity, other European mountainous areas.
The study fills a gap in the current historiography of Scottish notaries which is particularly strong on urban notaries and Lowland Scotland. Unlike these previous scholarly publications, the approach adopted to tackle this theme has been unashamedly holistic in an effort to understand fully the activities performed by notaries and other legal practitioners and their wider roles within that society. Although relatively limited, their presence in the region was geographically widespread with a number of notaries even settling in outlying rural areas in the seventeenth century. However, their core presence was to be found in the burghs on the eastern coast of the region and particularly Inverness and the Chanonry of Ross as administrative and judicial centres of the northern Highlands.
More than being mere scriveners writing deeds and attesting facts, notaries took on other duties and responsibilities and contributed to an extensive range of work within society at an economic, political and socio-cultural level.
The profession can be defined by its mobility with its extensive travelling and professional diversification. Notaries could accumulate positions at any given time or change career paths to address the needs of their communities relying on this workforce of educated men and also based on their writing skills. In addition, social mobility also defined the profession as a number of these men of law climbed the social ladder in their quest for status, identity and public recognition, primarily as landlords and as members of burghal governing bodies.
Scottish historiography has demonstrated that from the early seventeenth century, the placement of kinsmen and other local men as legal agents for their clans gradually grew. The present study complements and expands upon these previous findings by showing that they also applied to men from the lower branch of the legal profession such as notaries and writers drawn from cadet and satellite families as well as burghal families. This was made possible through the placement of sons with politicians and lawyers in the Scottish capital and through marriage into these legal ranks. Not only were notaries and writers in residence in Edinburgh meeting the demands of their clients, they were also pursuing their own family strategies.
Among these clients were the leading Hebridean clans who used a dual system by employing notaries from both the mainland and the Isles. In so doing, they were able to replicate the legal watching brief set in place in Edinburgh through their legal agents by establishing another regional watching brief this time located in the administrative and judicial centres of Inverness and the Chanonry of Ross through local notaries and writers.
The notaries’ involvement in local crime and violence both as perpetrators and victims points to their integration within their communities, including their darker aspects. They had to adapt to their surrounding environment. However, it is crucial to remember that through most of their work and agency they encouraged peaceful activities and promoted the rule of law and due process. As independent public officials, they contributed directly and indirectly albeit modestly to the wider process of State formation and governance of the northern Highlands and the region’s integration into Scotland and Britain by privileging land conveyancing over sword power in the protection and acquisition of land, by favouring arbitration over blood feud, and by countenancing trade and commercial contracts over clan raids.
It is thus no surprise to find that notaries permeated Scottish lives and daily activities from the estate economy to culture, trade, law, and politics. Although history has been written about these fields and disciplines in early-modern Scotland, few historians have paused to consider the men who actually made these studies possible, as the writers of the very documents used to produce this scholarship. These texts were more important than their writers. This booklet has humbly sought to redress that imbalance and for Clio to invite notaries and other legal practitioners into the historical light.
Articles by Thomas Brochard
Based on the same source material, this second part of the article explores the mechanics of deputation through procuration and the solutions available when that trust reached another point of friction and tension, namely litigation.
The article argues that deputation was an important feature in the relations between Scotland and the Baltic. These Scots and residents of the Baltic employed that useful and practical legal means for a large range of activities from the collection of debts to the receipt of formal possession of lands or property, as well as to run the family business. Through the latter instance, women were put at the forefront of these commercial activities during their husbands’ absence.
A final circumstance under which individuals resorted to procuration was for legal representation in court. Yet again, notaries and professional writers facilitated that judicial process both in an anticipatory or preventive mode to reduce and moderate risk and in a corrective mode as participants in the judicial system. In themselves, relevant paperwork and procedures have demonstrated that the bedrock of these exchanges between Scotland and the Baltic is founded on the two complementary notions of trust and deputation. When these broke down, legal procedures were available for redress, with notaries as agents contributing to and underpinning that process.
Scottish burgh and notarial records present a rich picture of the logistics and nuts and bolts of business, commercial and financial arrangements, as well as of people’s daily lives. Notaries assisted in the management of risk through their drafting of contracts and charter parties, and these bonds strengthened trust between contracting parties in a way that oral agreements could not. In addition, these sources highlight little known or under-researched aspects concerning the Scots who worked, settled and formed communities in the Baltic and the North Sea, in particular underscoring women’s influence and agency and the activities of another poorly studied group, apprentices. Notarial writs underlined the role of women as business partners. Families invested in the education of their sons and had them enter into apprenticeship in the Baltic and North Sea trade or businesses.
The focus has been on these daily connections and the underpinning paperwork and procedures that smoothed them at a crucial point of friction and tension within these exchanges: death. In themselves, the documents have shown that the bedrock of these exchanges lay on the two complementary notions of trust and deputation. When these broke down, procedures were available for redress.
By reconciling these seemingly antinomic worlds of northern Scotland and humanist, scholarly culture, alba help redefine and nuance these Highlanders' and northern Scots' identity, culture, and character, which are more in line with these qualities associated with the world of alba, attesting to this group of Scottish northerners' integration into the intellectual and humanist networks then present in Europe.
For these individuals, theirs was a Gaelic and/or Scots culture and its appreciation which was complemented with an awareness of and a thirst for a Latinate and Classical culture and an openness to a European and word culture, by playing tourist on the Continent and being receptive to this new and foreign environment. Far from being impervious to other cultures, they opened themselves to these and welcomed foreign visitors. The roles were reversed and, in turn, they acted as guides to these tourists visiting Scotland and their communities. Through alba, it is possible to gain a better understanding of early tourism in Scotland and of tourist sites in northern Scotland, putting them not only in a national context but also an international framework.
One important source has been overlooked in this respect, namely alba amicorum, or friendship albums. This paper examines some of these heraldic entries contributed by Scots from the emergence of the tradition of alba in the 1540s until the late seventeenth century. These have been arranged thematically under socio-professional categories to demonstrate not only the broad range of Scots who displayed their blazons that way but also the specific context for doing so.
between the sporting and working/residential environments for a number of sports. The burghs were keen to capitalise on these transferable skills of a geographically mobile and multi-activity sports workforce but also to attract audiences to town. Part 1 of the paper covering horse racing, archery and fencing appeared in Volume 27 of Scottish Archives. Part 2 covers the sports of golf, cachepell/tennis, football and bowling.
One important source has been overlooked in this respect, namely alba amicorum, or friendship albums. This paper examines some of these heraldic entries contributed by Scots from the emergence of the tradition of alba in the 1540s until the late seventeenth century. These have been arranged thematically under socio-professional categories to demonstrate not only the broad range of Scots who displayed their blazons that way but also the specific context for doing so.
The present article expands on this multiple usage of the symbol and underlines the universality of the symbol, being found across the many layers of Perth’s community and the functions to which it applied, be it commercial (as capacity measure), judicial/criminal (branding), and military (town’s colours), among others. This visual token pervaded the daily lives of the people of Perth and its visitors, given that these representations were all within the public sphere.
Finally, the symbol of the Holy Lamb acted like a visual grammar that was much more present in society and that would have been more broadly understood in the local community than can be assumed at first, including to the many inhabitants who could not read or write. This made it a very potent symbol indeed, much more so than text. It helped shape local identity around a common and powerful image, though at times in an ambiguous fashion as seen in the case of branding.
Copies of the booklet are available at Inverness Library, the University of St Andrews Library, in the National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh), and (in due time) the British Library (London).
Within the field of interpersonal violence, the duel still fascinates historians. However, within the Scottish context, this extreme form of fight has not yet been properly investigated, except in its judicial cadre or in a few case studies. The topic is usually approached from the perspective of honour or from within the context of feuding. Whilst the number of clan chiefs was relatively low, the duel found uptake among a broader section of clan gentry who aspired to attain honourable status, given its significance within their value system. Expanding on the exploration of Scottish nobles’ honour, this multifaceted and adaptable form of fighting honour was present in the country’s outlying territories in a modest way. Its presence within Highland clanship highlights the wide social and geographical dimension of the duel.
The present volume aims to help construct a national picture of duelling in Scotland, as already exists for much of Europe, positioning duelling in relation to the notions of honour and blood feud. In addition, these affairs of honour have very rarely – if at all – been examined from a regional perspective. Such an approach not only reveals interesting aspects about the duel per se but also sets the topic within the wider dynamic of state formation and identity.
In a sense, the evolution of the duel and of its corollary honour did not follow a linear progression from uncontrolled human passions to controlled ones. Nor was it restricted to a binary development from duel or honour to civility. Societal, cultural, and behavioural factors generally accounted for the relative absence of duels in the Scottish northern Highlands and Highlands, partly due to the nature of Scottish clanship and its modus operandi. This is not to say that this was a prerequisite for the absence of duelling. The duel did not constitute a habitus of the clan gentry nor a carrier of their identity, which was even more pronounced in the area’s west coast and islands as locals did not engage in single combats. They took a different approach to redress affronts to honour with a greater combined emphasis on the collective at both a conceptual (collective liability) and processual (blood feud and arbitration) level.
Despite the popular dichotomy driving a wedge between the Lowlands and the Highlands, this study has highlighted many similarities found between the Highland élite and Lowland nobility in the strategies and alternatives used to defend one’s honour and in the common aspirations towards Crown honours and titles and official positions.
Furthermore, the pattern of the duel has ramifications for this perceived geographically peripheral society in terms of the so-called ‘civilizing’ process. The duel contributed to state formation and the integration of these northern Highlanders within wider Scottish and British society. This, ironically, resulted in duelling denoting a measure of civility in the integration of these northern duellists within the kingdom and Europe at large. The duel represented the modest diffusion of Renaissance and Baroque ideals in terms of the assertion of the self. It can also be seen as a component in the (non-linear) evolution towards commercialism and towards honour as a service to the Crown rather than the personal use of violence. Indeed, the clan élite of the northern Highlands accepted State honours and entered Crown service, somehow clothing themselves with these external symbols of honour, whilst still adhering to a more internalized sense of honour inherited from the kindred and lineage. These were not necessarily competing systems of honour but rather parallel or complementary ones. Yet when the civil wars broke out, a number of these clan élites abandoned honourable service to the monarchy, a temporal form of honour, to focus on kindred and lineage, an intemporal one, refined by a humanist and religious critique. By doing so, the clan élite loosened the bond between honour and violence whilst maintaining martial valour.
The history of the duel in Scotland is yet to be written, but it might well be that with the transition from clan conflict to military service (seen as a nursery for valorous men) on behalf of the Crown, this adaptation and transposition of masculine honour based in part on martial identity from one collective entity (the clan) to another (the Highland regiment) played a role in checking the growth of the duel in the Scottish Highlands. Indeed, instances of individual honour do not seem to have seriously compromised the collective imperative, which prevailed as long as Gaelic society in Scotland remained clan-based, and even beyond given that the collective clan base survived the decline of blood feud. These preliminary foundations enable subsequent analyses of the duel in the Scottish Highlands for the eighteenth century onwards and establish markers for an overall study of the duel in Scotland.
Notaries routinely dealt with intimate family and private matters. These fascinating historical figures crossed political, judicial, socio-economic, and cultural divides as part of their work. But despite their evident importance in Scottish society, they have been little studied.
The booklet explores for the first time the provision and role of notaries – touching briefly on other legal personnel – in the northern Highlands, namely the shires of Ross, Sutherland, Caithness and the Outer Hebrides in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and compares the situation there with that prevailing in other parts of Scotland and, in a limited capacity, other European mountainous areas.
The study fills a gap in the current historiography of Scottish notaries which is particularly strong on urban notaries and Lowland Scotland. Unlike these previous scholarly publications, the approach adopted to tackle this theme has been unashamedly holistic in an effort to understand fully the activities performed by notaries and other legal practitioners and their wider roles within that society. Although relatively limited, their presence in the region was geographically widespread with a number of notaries even settling in outlying rural areas in the seventeenth century. However, their core presence was to be found in the burghs on the eastern coast of the region and particularly Inverness and the Chanonry of Ross as administrative and judicial centres of the northern Highlands.
More than being mere scriveners writing deeds and attesting facts, notaries took on other duties and responsibilities and contributed to an extensive range of work within society at an economic, political and socio-cultural level.
The profession can be defined by its mobility with its extensive travelling and professional diversification. Notaries could accumulate positions at any given time or change career paths to address the needs of their communities relying on this workforce of educated men and also based on their writing skills. In addition, social mobility also defined the profession as a number of these men of law climbed the social ladder in their quest for status, identity and public recognition, primarily as landlords and as members of burghal governing bodies.
Scottish historiography has demonstrated that from the early seventeenth century, the placement of kinsmen and other local men as legal agents for their clans gradually grew. The present study complements and expands upon these previous findings by showing that they also applied to men from the lower branch of the legal profession such as notaries and writers drawn from cadet and satellite families as well as burghal families. This was made possible through the placement of sons with politicians and lawyers in the Scottish capital and through marriage into these legal ranks. Not only were notaries and writers in residence in Edinburgh meeting the demands of their clients, they were also pursuing their own family strategies.
Among these clients were the leading Hebridean clans who used a dual system by employing notaries from both the mainland and the Isles. In so doing, they were able to replicate the legal watching brief set in place in Edinburgh through their legal agents by establishing another regional watching brief this time located in the administrative and judicial centres of Inverness and the Chanonry of Ross through local notaries and writers.
The notaries’ involvement in local crime and violence both as perpetrators and victims points to their integration within their communities, including their darker aspects. They had to adapt to their surrounding environment. However, it is crucial to remember that through most of their work and agency they encouraged peaceful activities and promoted the rule of law and due process. As independent public officials, they contributed directly and indirectly albeit modestly to the wider process of State formation and governance of the northern Highlands and the region’s integration into Scotland and Britain by privileging land conveyancing over sword power in the protection and acquisition of land, by favouring arbitration over blood feud, and by countenancing trade and commercial contracts over clan raids.
It is thus no surprise to find that notaries permeated Scottish lives and daily activities from the estate economy to culture, trade, law, and politics. Although history has been written about these fields and disciplines in early-modern Scotland, few historians have paused to consider the men who actually made these studies possible, as the writers of the very documents used to produce this scholarship. These texts were more important than their writers. This booklet has humbly sought to redress that imbalance and for Clio to invite notaries and other legal practitioners into the historical light.
Based on the same source material, this second part of the article explores the mechanics of deputation through procuration and the solutions available when that trust reached another point of friction and tension, namely litigation.
The article argues that deputation was an important feature in the relations between Scotland and the Baltic. These Scots and residents of the Baltic employed that useful and practical legal means for a large range of activities from the collection of debts to the receipt of formal possession of lands or property, as well as to run the family business. Through the latter instance, women were put at the forefront of these commercial activities during their husbands’ absence.
A final circumstance under which individuals resorted to procuration was for legal representation in court. Yet again, notaries and professional writers facilitated that judicial process both in an anticipatory or preventive mode to reduce and moderate risk and in a corrective mode as participants in the judicial system. In themselves, relevant paperwork and procedures have demonstrated that the bedrock of these exchanges between Scotland and the Baltic is founded on the two complementary notions of trust and deputation. When these broke down, legal procedures were available for redress, with notaries as agents contributing to and underpinning that process.
Scottish burgh and notarial records present a rich picture of the logistics and nuts and bolts of business, commercial and financial arrangements, as well as of people’s daily lives. Notaries assisted in the management of risk through their drafting of contracts and charter parties, and these bonds strengthened trust between contracting parties in a way that oral agreements could not. In addition, these sources highlight little known or under-researched aspects concerning the Scots who worked, settled and formed communities in the Baltic and the North Sea, in particular underscoring women’s influence and agency and the activities of another poorly studied group, apprentices. Notarial writs underlined the role of women as business partners. Families invested in the education of their sons and had them enter into apprenticeship in the Baltic and North Sea trade or businesses.
The focus has been on these daily connections and the underpinning paperwork and procedures that smoothed them at a crucial point of friction and tension within these exchanges: death. In themselves, the documents have shown that the bedrock of these exchanges lay on the two complementary notions of trust and deputation. When these broke down, procedures were available for redress.
By reconciling these seemingly antinomic worlds of northern Scotland and humanist, scholarly culture, alba help redefine and nuance these Highlanders' and northern Scots' identity, culture, and character, which are more in line with these qualities associated with the world of alba, attesting to this group of Scottish northerners' integration into the intellectual and humanist networks then present in Europe.
For these individuals, theirs was a Gaelic and/or Scots culture and its appreciation which was complemented with an awareness of and a thirst for a Latinate and Classical culture and an openness to a European and word culture, by playing tourist on the Continent and being receptive to this new and foreign environment. Far from being impervious to other cultures, they opened themselves to these and welcomed foreign visitors. The roles were reversed and, in turn, they acted as guides to these tourists visiting Scotland and their communities. Through alba, it is possible to gain a better understanding of early tourism in Scotland and of tourist sites in northern Scotland, putting them not only in a national context but also an international framework.
One important source has been overlooked in this respect, namely alba amicorum, or friendship albums. This paper examines some of these heraldic entries contributed by Scots from the emergence of the tradition of alba in the 1540s until the late seventeenth century. These have been arranged thematically under socio-professional categories to demonstrate not only the broad range of Scots who displayed their blazons that way but also the specific context for doing so.
between the sporting and working/residential environments for a number of sports. The burghs were keen to capitalise on these transferable skills of a geographically mobile and multi-activity sports workforce but also to attract audiences to town. Part 1 of the paper covering horse racing, archery and fencing appeared in Volume 27 of Scottish Archives. Part 2 covers the sports of golf, cachepell/tennis, football and bowling.
One important source has been overlooked in this respect, namely alba amicorum, or friendship albums. This paper examines some of these heraldic entries contributed by Scots from the emergence of the tradition of alba in the 1540s until the late seventeenth century. These have been arranged thematically under socio-professional categories to demonstrate not only the broad range of Scots who displayed their blazons that way but also the specific context for doing so.
The present article expands on this multiple usage of the symbol and underlines the universality of the symbol, being found across the many layers of Perth’s community and the functions to which it applied, be it commercial (as capacity measure), judicial/criminal (branding), and military (town’s colours), among others. This visual token pervaded the daily lives of the people of Perth and its visitors, given that these representations were all within the public sphere.
Finally, the symbol of the Holy Lamb acted like a visual grammar that was much more present in society and that would have been more broadly understood in the local community than can be assumed at first, including to the many inhabitants who could not read or write. This made it a very potent symbol indeed, much more so than text. It helped shape local identity around a common and powerful image, though at times in an ambiguous fashion as seen in the case of branding.