It would be easy to assume that the voices of the people of medieval Scotland are long lost. The vagaries of source survival mean that although a healthy collection of governmental records and estate papers survives, this tends to consist of highly formulaic administrative documents. It is not until the 16th century that substantial collections of correspondence become available to illuminate the lives and affairs of people outside of royal and diplomatic contexts. For the Middle Ages, it is difficult to detect the voices of individual people in Scotland, and even harder to locate recorded utterances of speech. Although important work in recent years on medieval European politics has paid attention to the role of ‘popular voices’ and political protest, the goalin this article is to explore some ways in which the voices, written and spoken, of individual people may be detected in late medieval Scotland, in more everyday interactions.
The ‘big picture’ to observe is the longer-term relationship between orality and written culture, or the ‘literate mind and the oral past’, as Walter Ong has put it. Earlier centuries had seen the expansion of writing as a tool of Church administration and governmental practice. In Scotland it was in the years around 1100 that the oldest surviving charters appear. But it was not until the later 15th century that the production and survival of handwritten documents in Scotland was to expand dramatically, part of a wider European trend (of which the printing press was more a symptom than cause) towards extensive use of written records.
In this context, the is a rich resource in which to search for voices. The ARO is a digital edition of the burgh’s earliest surviving council registers, freely available as a file collection, and also searchable via for which see the links in the further reading.offers an exceptional level of insight into everyday life.
