ABSTRACT
In 1923, two scholars published a study of the estate of the burgesses in the Scottish parliament between 1552 and 1707. In their introduction, they stated that ‘the whole position of the burghs in Parliament has necessarily been brought under review’, while other incidental questions were examined. Their frank description of the results is arresting: ‘In settling these side-issues … we have found no reason to depart from the established views, and from our main line of investigation, nothing surprising has emerged.’ Perhaps this was false modesty, for they did tentatively suggest that their findings were ‘in some sense new’. 1 Their thinking was so constrained by the contemporary historiographical fashion, which viewed the Scottish parliament as feeble and ineffective, that they were unable to explore the implications of some of their findings. Most notably, they could not entertain the idea that the final say over whether a burgh might enter parliament or not lay with the convention of burghs, not the king. 2 Fashions have changed and, as a result, it is hoped that this study does depart from some of the established views about the Scottish parliament, how it worked, how it was perceived and how the burghs operated within it, and that some of its findings might even be regarded as surprising.
