10 - The Law and Economy of Shipwreck in Scotland during the Sixteenth Century

Summary

A: INTRODUCTION

The title above specifies the spatial as well as the temporal limitations of this essay, which examines evidence of shipwrecks in Scotland during the sixteenth century alone. During this period many ships sailing out of Scottish ports were wrecked in other countries, including Norway, and these disasters sometimes had repercussions at home. The concern here, however, is with the legal and (to a lesser extent) the economic consequences of the shipwrecks that often occurred on the coasts of Scotland. More precisely, the concern is with the rights and duties people were believed to have when they were involved in recovering the remains of ships – including their equipment and cargoes – after they were destroyed while navigating near Scotland. Two main types of evidence are considered, both of which must be handled cautiously. In the first place, access to the subject is eased by the existence of several treatises touching on the legal aspects of shipwreck, written by lawyers during the last quarter of the century. The caveat requiring to be attached to this material is that its writers tended to draw their information from other books, and may not have provided an accurate account of how wrecks were dealt with in practice. In the second place, records survive of litigation relating to the subject, sometimes in burgh courts sitting in coastal towns, sometimes in central courts sitting in Edinburgh. The caveat requiring to be attached to this material is that for much of the century the expectation was that litigation relating to navigation would be dealt with in specialised admiralty courts, from which scarcely any records have survived. Since the treatise writers usually wrote about the law applicable in the admiralty courts, they may be taken to compensate to some extent for the absence of these records, just as the availability of records from other courts may be taken to compensate to some extent for the theoretical tendencies of the treatise writers. If viewed from the different perspectives provided by these two bodies of material, the consequences of shipwrecks in Scotland during the sixteenth century may come into view fairly clearly, but it needs to be remembered that there is a significant gap in the evidence available.