Series 3 > Court book of the Burgh of Kirkintilloch 1658-1694

PREFATORY NOTE
Professor George S. Pryde died suddenly in Cornwall on
6 May 1961, when he had almost completed the editing of
this volume. Although a graduate of St. Andrews, his
academic career, after a period of study at Yale, was spent
in the University of Glasgow. Successively Assistant,
Lecturer and Reader in the Department of Scottish History
and Literature, he succeeded to the Chair in 1957. His
publications in the fields of both medieval and modern
Scottish history are well known, but special mention must
be made here of his edition of the Ayr Burgh Accounts,
published by the Scottish History Society in 1937. He
became a member of the Society in 1934 and joined the
Council in 1948. He was at the time of his death Chairman
of Council, after holding that office for only a few months.
Tributes have been paid elsewhere to his gifts as an his¬
torian and as a teacher but his colleagues on the Council
of the Society will recall also the cheerful friendliness which
he brought to its meetings.
Professor Pryde had prepared for print almost the whole
of the text of the court book and his introduction was
complete to 1660. The only addition which has been made
to his text is a section at the end of the manuscript which
appears below on pp. 146-51. To complete the introduc¬
tion for the period after 1660, two sections have been added
from the Rhind Lectures which Professor Pryde delivered
in 1958. These sections, though less full than the remainder
of the introduction, clearly follow out the main lines of
the editor’s study of the Scottish burgh of barony. Un¬
fortunately, Professor Pryde’s papers contained no more
than a few notes specifically about the text of the Kirk¬
intilloch Burgh Court Book, which must therefore be left
to speak for itself, against the background provided in the
introduction. We have been responsible for seeing the
volume through the press, and the index has been prepared
by Mr. Ian D. Grant.