ABSTRACT
The various accounts left behind in the records for the burgh of Aberdeen consistently acknowledge a very pronounced concern both the magistracy and the burgh community had regarding the clear danger criminal activities posed to the burgh’s well-being. This underlying concern, rooted in the desire to maintain stability and ‘neighbourliness’ within the community, demonstrates that contemporaries recognized the inherent power of petty crimes, particularly as a means of achieving goals, settling disputes or challenging established dynamics. In this regard, petty crimes were a means of continuing the negotiation of social relations and power dynamics within the burgh. In their keenness to maintain already established social structures, magistrates used their role in punishing wrongdoers to restore those convicted of crimes ‘to the ordor of discipline’ 1 thus diminishing the impact their wrongful actions had on the community. But in doing so the burgh magistrates implicitly acknowledged that petty crimes could reshape the boundaries of belonging by challenging accepted norms, customs and statutes that were in place to help maintain an orderly society. This is most obvious in the fact that the magistrates expected the wider community to play a role in regulating crime, thus enabling a much greater number of the burgh’s inhabitants to participate in defining and redefining the social boundaries of the burgh.
