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

Ixxvi KIRKINTILLOCH BURGH COURT BOOK
frustrated by its fellows,1 and it remained in possession of
the status that had been thrust upon it.
Dysart’s elevation seems to have been equally irregular.
It was a burgh in barony, holding from Lord Sinclair, as
early as 1510,2 and it was still denominated a burgh of
barony in 1699 3 ; yet, as we have seen,4 it had been stented
with the other burghs of the realm in 1535. From its
appearance in Parliament in 1594, at latest, it must be
reckoned, for all practical purposes, a royal burgh,5 though
any evidence that a royal charter to that effect was ever
granted, or even thought to have been granted, has eluded
the search of this writer.
Dunfermline is commonly stated 6 to have become a royal
burgh by the charter of 24 May 1588, but that document is
merely a crown confirmation of a charter of 1549, itself
ratifying two fourteenth century grants by the abbots to
the burgesses.7 In a charter of 11 February 1588/9 the
town is described as ex antique in liberum burgum regalitatis
erectum, and on 7 March 1593/4 the temporal lordship, with
the burghs of Dunfermline, Kirkcaldy and South Queens-
ferry, was conveyed in regality to Queen Anne.8 No later
charter of re-erection seems to have survived, and it would
appear that contemporaries (like modern commentators)
misread the 1588 deed as making Dunfermline a royal
burgh, or else that its holding from the queen as superior,
in the charter of 1594, was taken as establishing its ‘ royal ’
tenure as a burgh. From January 1593/4, at all events—
two months before the grant to Queen Anne—the burgh
1 It was the opposition of Convention, unwilling to lose even one small
contributor to its stent-roll, rather than of Parliament, which ultimately
(by 1689) defeated the move : B.C.R.B., iv, 70, 77 ; cf. Rait, Parliaments
of Scotland, 260.
2 Notices from Dysart Records (Maitland Club, 1853), 1-2.
3 Sir Francis Kinloch of Gilmertoun was then served heir to the barony
and burgh of Dysart: Inq. Ret. Abbrev., Fife, no. 1431.
* Cf. supra, p. Ivii.
3 A.P.S., iv, 50.
6 E.g., in Rait, Parliaments of Scotland, 255.
7 The grants concerned the common muir and feu-ferme tenure:
E. Beveridge, Burgh Rees, of Dunfermline (1917), xlviii-liii; E. Henderson,
Annals of Dunfermline (1879), 231-6 ; R.M.S., v, 1548.
8 lb., v, 1629 ; vi, 75.