ABSTRACT
Edda Frankot has shown that the burgh records of Aberdeen provide a rich repository of information about maritime trade and its legal regulation in the fifteenth century. In fact, many hundreds of entries relating to the same subject can also be found in the records surviving from the first half of the sixteenth century until they start to thin out in the later 1540s, after the Scottish admiral began to assert an exclusive jurisdiction over seafaring causes. It seems clear that the study of language must be central to any attempt to trace the development of maritime law in the early sixteenth century, not just for the obvious reason that our knowledge of the subject has to be drawn from what is said about it in written records, but also because lawful behaviour appears to have been conceived of as behaviour susceptible to acceptable description.
