The Obligations of Kinship and Alliance within Governance in the Scottish Borders, 1528-1625

Abstract

The importance of kinship and lordship in determining relationships within medieval Scotland has long been acknowledged. In the late sixteenth century, however, Scotland underwent an intensification of government in which the crown increasingly drew judicial processes within its own remit, replacing the private justice dispensed by regional elites with the public justice of the central courts in Edinburgh. The assumption might therefore be that the older obligations of kinship and lordship would have been overridden by the newly persistent demands for personal accountability to the crown. This article demonstrates instead that such obligations were still significant in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and that processes associated with traditional private justice were now being used in an unprecedented way by a Scottish crown, increasingly intolerant of violent crime. Familial and fictive familial obligations continued to shape how early modern Scottish society was organized and regulated.