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In Her Majesty's Register House in Edinburgh there are preserved two
volumes of great interest to Stewarton. The Baron Court Hook of Corsehill from
1666-1719 and the Bonnet Court Hook of Stewarton from 1673-1790. From these and
other sources it is possible to glean a tremendous amount of information about
life in the town and landward districts at these times. Indeed we are very lucky
that there records have survived, for there are few towns the size of Stewarton
which can boast of such a complete record of the local personalities of so long
ago.
At this tune there was no town council and no police court,
and the duties of both were executed by the Baron Court, sitting under the
chairmanship of the Land of Corsehill or his deputy the baron Baillie. Since the
laird of Corsehill only had jurisdiction over the vassals of the barony of
Corsehill, there are certain rather obvious gaps in the records, as parts of the
neighborhood were under the jurisdiction of the adjoining Lairds of Lainshaw and
Robertland. the main industries were then as now agriculture and bonnet making,
the latter being organized and controlled by an elected council called the
Bonnet Guild.
In the minutes of the meetings held by these bodies, we read
of the every day life of the town, the troubles of the bonnet industry, the
difficulties of selling goods, the way the land was farmed, the quirks and
idiosyncrasies of the farmers and of the constant wickedness of the people who
lived in the Kirkton whose misdemeanors were the most frequent cases to be
brought before the Court. The dwellers in the Kirkton were up to every sort of
mischief. They broke each other's dykes, they stopped-up their neighbours
drains, kept hens in seed-time and harvest, fed their beasts on other people's
grass, provided lodgings for " Margaret Dog, a common thief ", sold
excessive quantities of ale to beggars which made them violent and a nuisance to
the more respectable inhabitants, and spent their spare time in drinking
and in flyting, scolding, cursing, swearing, baiting and sinking ane anither to
the great dishonor of god and shame among Christians.
Some of the trials before the Baron Court were not without
then funny side. In 1668, one William Walker in Gooshills was accused of
“commuting a blood and battery upon John Dillidaff, tailor in Milstonhall in
that he gripped him by the hair of the head and wounded him in the face "
in Arthur Bryce the smith's house. The tailor could not he said to be entirely
without blame, for he in turn assaulted William Walker on the next day by
striking him two blows on the head and shoulders with a staff to the great
effusion of his blood. It came out in the trial that William Walker had also
struck a stranger on the highway, so he was fined £20 while John Dillidaff was
only fined £10.
It was the custom of the town to keep their horses tethered
in the common grazings, and there were frequent complaint, brought against
people who pastured loose horses and mares " amangst the milk kye.
sheep and calves whereby they are wronged and hurt". There were a variety
of actions involving horses around the end of the seventeenth century. In 1672,
Thomas Wyllie pursued Thomas Wyllie in Corsehill claiming that he took out his
horse from its stall after promising that none but the midwife should ride it,
and that alter being returned very hot it died after previously enjoying good
health. The infuriated owner claimed that it was worth more than £20, but this
was not upheld by the Judge, who allowed him only £10.
In 1673, the Court decided that Andrew Buchanan of Robertland
should be paid with " ane sufficient blue bonnet" for curing a lame
horse belonging to Thomas Wyllie in Little Corsehill.
In I684, hens were found to be a great source of annoyance,
and an act was passed forbidding the keeping of hens at seed-time and harvest.
This legislation was repeated with more detail in 1709, when it was enacted that
no person within the town of Stewarton might keep any poultry from 1st March to
1st October, under a penalty of £4Scots each bird, with liberty to any person
suffering damage from them to shoot them or otherwise kill them.
By far the chief subject of interest to those who brought
their troubles before the Bonnet Court was the cow these beasts appear on each
page of the Court book with monotonous regularity. As the result of the
semi-communal system of agriculture practiced at this period coupled with a want
of dykes and very poor supervision, Cows were always straying into somebody
else's corn or eating somebody else’s grass or in some other way giving rise
to what the laird once described as " crewell and bluidie ryot "
between people who were otherwise perfectly well-behaved, quiet and pleasant
neighbours.
Take the case of Jonet Armour in Taill vs. William Wyllie: in
Corsehouse' (1668). The pursuer complained against Wyllie for
"baiting and abusing her with stroaks and bruising of her with his knees
when she was turning off his cattell from her own grass " and this she
offered to prove by two witnesses. The first of these gentlemen said that he was
out of earshot at the tine, but the second said that he had seen the defender
throw Jonet to the ground, three times on Saturday last. The Judge finding the
matter "dubious, " fined both the parties!
Other events leading to a breach of the peace was disputes over money owed and
goods repaired or delivered. Such was the Cause of James Miller, shoemaker,
beating William Peacock's wife over the head with a stranger's shoe, " to
the great effusion of her blood, " in 1709, all the while uttering
"horrid oathes "
More serious although less severely punished was slander,
when unfounded accusations were made by one person against another to the
detriment of the victim's good name and reputation. In this class came the
action brought by Isobel Hunter, the wife of "Hew Hamill at the Kirk",
against the minister, the Rev. John Duncanson in 1678 was said that he minister
had slandered this coupe by saying that they had bought cheese that had been
plundered by the Highlandmen and had sold it in one-pound lots, and that they
had bought the Laird of Lainshaws bonds from the same source. It was alleged for
good measure that the minister had called Hew a knave. The minister denied all
this, but, probably because of the accusation brought against him, said that he
was willing to prove that in fact Hew was a knave. His defense was unsuccessful,
and the Court, holding Hew to be an honest man, fined the minister £20 Scots.
From all this sort of thing, the reader must think that
Stewarton was a wild and lawless sort of place, inhabited by a race of people
who spent most of their time either drinking or fighting their neighbours This
is of course far from the truth. The very fact that these cases came before the
Court at all is evidence of the peacefulness and good behavior of the people of
Stewarton. In addition to the trial of misdemeanors, the Barron Court made
regulations for the general good of the community. On one occasion the Court
enacted that each occupier of properly must plant a certain number of trees in
proportion to the amount of land which he occupied. Before this, Stewarton must
have been very bare and windswept. Two other regulations of this kind made by
the Baron Court was an Act to encourage the building of dykes and the draining
of land, and an "Act against dogs Known to wirre Sheep "
The bonnet trade was in existence in Stewarton as far back as
1590, and it is very possible that it had its origins at a very much earlier
date, in 1630, it was a small but powerful body which held meetings under the
chairmanship of the Deacon Heritable, the Laird of Corsehill, and was known as
the Bonnet Court of Stewarton. On the 12th April, 1650, the "Great
Agreement " Was signed between the Deacon Heritable of the Bonnet Court on
the one hand and the Deacon of the Incorporation of Bonnet makers and Dyers of
Glasgow on the other. This allowed the bonnet makers of Stewarton, in return for
guaranteeing the workmanship of Stewarton bonnets, " in all tyme cumming to
haunt the mercats of Glasgow to sell their bonnets.” The Bonnet Court
appointed " sichters " to examine the bonnets and fines were imposed
on any person whose work was not up to the required standard. From time to time
new standards were laid down for the benefit of the sichters, and the penalties
were rigorously exacted from defaulting bonnet makers. Bonnet making was very
much a family trade, and in 1731 it was enacted by the Bonnet Court that
“children might not be taught the trade by persons outside the child's family,
unless the parents of the child had died.”
In 1793 the first statistical account was published, with the
Stewarton section contributed by the Rev. Thomas Maxwell, the parish minister.
He informs us, amongst many other interesting facts, that there were between one
hundred and one hundred and thirty handloom weavers in the town, and that the
bonnet trade employs "a great number of hands. Thomas Maxwell was said to
have preached the same sermon on four consecutive Sundays and on the fifth, to
the congregation the change which, by this time demanding, he turned to the last
page of the manuscript and read it backwards. |