Crime, Community and Belonging

At the heart of the regulatory processes at work in Aberdeen was the idea, common in both England and Scotland at the time, of protecting the ‘commoun weal’. Paul Slack has argued that for early modern English towns, the common weal ‘was not a programme, still less a manifesto for a party, not even a strategy. Well before the 1540s it was a rhetorical slogan conferring legitimacy on almost any public activity; and it was in origin simply a translation of a commonplace aspiration.’ ¹ While dates associated with historical events and trends tend to also have a specific geographical relationship, Slack’s identification of concerns for the common weal existing prior to 1540 in England can be extended to include Scotland as well. Roger Mason has shown that during the early modern period the ‘commonweal’ roughly equated to the ‘community’; this in turn can be taken to mean the ‘community of the realm’ and the ‘community of the burgh’. ² Accounts found in the Aberdeen Council Register indicate that plague, poverty, idle persons, breakers of local statutes and committers of various other offences occupied the daily business of the baillies and the rest of the town council. In performing their civic duties, these officials equated regulating society and maintaining the established social order with protecting the common weal. Even in instances where the court clerk did not expressly use the words ‘commoun weill’ or ‘guid of the toun’ in his accounts, he made it clear that the court perceived such actions as threatening the community. For example, two inhabitants of the burgh convicted for drawing swords and attacking each other found themselves amerced for ‘trubling of the town’. ³ While the clerk did not explicitly use the words ‘commoun weill’, his concern that misbehaviour undermined the community’s well-being is apparent. This stands in contrast to attitudes held elsewhere. ⁴