Property

The orthodox assessment of the pre-modern Scottish burgh is that it was a community ‘organised around a market’. ¹ But while there is no questioning that the market played a significant role in the lives of the inhabitants of early modern Scottish burghs, burghs were so much more than centres for the exchange of goods. They were also the social space where individuals lived, worked, played and prayed. As such, these centres of social interaction also witnessed their fair share of conflict. Earlier chapters have shown that local magistrates, keen to promote the ‘social virtue of good neighbourliness’, were determined to maintain the customs (both of the burgh and the realm) and patrol the morals of the burghs’ inhabitants. Thus, in their attempts to protect what contemporaries called the ‘common weal of the burgh’, local magistrates strove to curb wrongdoing, maintain the social structures that enabled burgh society to function, and construct the boundaries that reinforced a sense of place in the minds of the burgh’s inhabitants. ² It was here that the ideals and actualities of sixteenth-century burgh life frequently intersected.