Manuscripta juridica

Acta litigationis Scotiae: minutes of hearings in the Court of Session (1681/11 - 1682/12).

No title. Written by only one scribe, in neat handwriting: obviously a clerk, reporting the arguments and counter-arguments of parties. The minutes are often quite detailed. It is unlikely that the clerk was able to write so neatly in the haste of the court room. I rather deem that this is a neat copy from a hasty draft (such as in MS Edinburgh, Signet L, 25).

Each item ends with the words 'The Lords', in large bold-face characters, thus announcing the decision taken by the Lords. Yet, only in a minority of cases is the decision of the Lords then really reported right there. In most cases the clerk just left free space for several lines to be written. Furthermore, only the year and the month are stated. There is merely blank space in the place where the day should have been noted. I assume: the space was left blank to enter the date of the oncoming deliberation of the Lords. This date was not yet certain and could therefore not immediately be entered by the scribe.

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I would like to suggest that the phenomenon can be explained as follows. The Lords would only in rare cases render their decision immediately in the hearing, to be minuted by the clerk who attended to the hearing. In most cases the Lords would rather deliberate afterwards, and probably often not even on the same day or next day. They would then dictate the result of their deliberation to the clerk on duty for that deliberation, and only in a later stage of registration (if at all) the pertinent minutes of that latter clerk would be copied into the register of minutes of the original clerk who had attended to the hearing of parties. In the case of the present MS, this latter task was never accomplished. Furthermore, litigations were often ended by amicable agreement between the parties after the hearing in court, when the parties had obtained an impression of how the Lords would probably decide. In such cases the Lords were no longer required to deliberate and decide

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No. of pages: Pag. 1-611