Peoples of the Kingdom
Towns, Traders and Craftsmen
Towns, by contrast, were almost a wholly new feature of twelfth-century Scotland
There must have been both local markets and possibly also temporary fairs before
this. The size of hill fort settlements, such as those at Eildon Hill and Traprain Law
in the Dark Age period and the acceleration of cultivation and rural settlement
patterns in the eleventh century make the existence of 'proto-towns' possible. A few of the burghs
created in the twelfth century, especially those which (like the Canongate beside Edinburgh) were associated with a new religious house, were
wholly new towns built on green-field sites, but most of the places at which burghs
(such as Perth and Stirling) developed were at obvious crossing points of rivers or
conveniently sited at river mouths or estuaries (like Aberdeen, Berwick and
Inverkeithing) and had old names associated with them.
The term 'burgh' was a legal one, which gave a set of privileges to a community
of burgesses, including the right of trade and freedom from toll throughout the
kingdom. Burgh charters, together with the Leges Burgorum, a manual of detailed
practices relating to almost every aspect of urban life, trade and industry taken
almost verbatim from the customs of the English town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
were part of a calculated policy of innovation first practised by David I and
continued by his two grandsons. About fifteen burghs can trace their foundation to
David's reign, including Dunfermline, Edinburgh, Perth and Stirling, but the two
most important for much of the early medieval period - Berwick and Roxburgh - are
described as burghs before 1124. By 1200, Perth was ranked second behind
Berwick, their position both dependent on a flourishing cloth industry and a busy
trade in the export of wool overseas, mostly to Flanders. The third vital factor -
after trade and industry - in the growth of towns was the presence of the court,
either as (in the case of Perth and Stirling particularly) a place of frequent resort of
the king's household or as a base for a royal mint. Berwick, Roxburgh and
Edinburgh each had a mint established by 1153, but by 1250 there were mints in no
fewer than sixteen burghs, extending from Ayr and Berwick to Inverness.
Towns are easier to trace and describe than townspeople. Even their names are
elusive or, once found, enigmatic. Eighty-two burgesses of Berwick were recorded in
a list of 1291 and scrutiny of a variety of documents for early thirteenth-century. Perth yields about a hundred names. The earliest town-dwellers, it seems likely, were a mixture of native Scots and the same range of immigrants as typified rural
settlement in twelfth-century Lowland Scotland. In towns, however, the
proportion of foreign incomers would have been much larger and the presence of
Flemings, who brought with them the skills of cloth-making, particularly
conspicuous. Foreign merchants, factors and skippers would have been common
too. Berwick, Scotland's largest town, was a foreign trading colony; the Red Hall
and the White Hall, both in the town's Seagate, were the bases for Flemish and
German merchants by the end of the thirteenth century. Most of the ships which
carried Scotland's exports were foreign-owned and crewed; two-thirds of the ships carrying Scottish goods and wrecked in the English Coast in fourteenth century were Flemish.
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