Series 3 > Ayr Burgh accounts, 1534-1624

AYR BURGH ACCOUNTS
viii
down together by Mr. Michael Wallace,1 the Town Clerk
at that time. These 28 years, occupying 59 leaves of our
present MS., seem to have formed the earliest buik.2
There is a blank of 12 years—1562-74—though these were
probably the accounts for the hearing of which a writer
was brought from Edinburgh.3 The accounts for the last
fifty years, 1574-1624, were all written and mostly signed
by the perennial Town Clerk, John Masoun, whose period
as a writer of compts runs for slightly less than 39 years
—from Oct. 1586 4 to May 1625.
Of the value of the present record there can be no doubt.
There are earlier sources (some of them printed B) than
the Ayr MS., but a competent critic, after a careful search
and survey of Scottish burgh archives, concluded that
‘ this is probably the most complete set of early Town
Accounts extant in Scotland.’ 6 We have here, with only
a single gap of twelve years, a continuous and compre¬
hensive record of the normal financial workings of an
important Scots burgh during the ninety years stretching
from the middle period of James V’s personal rule to near
the close of James Vi’s reign. While Council Minutes and
Court Books cast many a side-light on the financial system
of the burghs, that system, in its entirety, can be recon¬
structed only from the evidence offered by a complete
record of the year-to-year raising and spending of the
municipal revenues and of the conciliar control of the
responsible magistrates.
1 He signed a Memorandum on fol. 38 v., and his handwriting is un¬
mistakable ; but Thomas Cranstoun is mentioned in 1551-52 as ordouring
compts ; p. 114 n. 2.
2 P. 135 n. 3. 8 P. 136 n. 1.
* The compts for the eleven years 1574-85 were all audited in April 1587.
6 Esp. for Aberdeen (Extracts, 1398-1657, in Spalding Club Misc., V);
a few fragments or whole accounts of other burghs are included in volumes
of Burgh Records, e.g. Lanark Rees., 1-2.
6 Anna J. Mill, An Inventory of the MS. Records of the Older Royal Burghs
of Scotland (St. Andrews Univ. Publication No. XVII, 1923), 9.