Series 3 > Ayr Burgh accounts, 1534-1624

XXI1
AYR BURGH ACCOUNTS
1691, when its visitors toured all the royal burghs, examin¬
ing accounts, collecting data on trade and shipping,
inquiring into payments of stents and the activities of
‘ unfree ’ places, and compiling detailed reports.1
The Exchequer endeavoured, during the sixteenth
century, to establish a right to audit and supervise burgh
accounts,2 but without any success; and Parliament’s
claim, implicit or (as in 1693) explicit, to control burghal
finance,3 was too vague and spasmodic to have much
effect. Except, therefore, that grave abuses might be
reported to, and corrected by, the Convention, municipal
finance was entirely a local concern.
The earliest burgh magistrates were the bailies, the
kyngis bailyeis* collectors of Crown rents, fines and
customs, who answered the Chamberlain as to all matters
of local import; the burgess-oath was taken to the King,
the bailies and the community.5 Less often there is
mention of a single chief magistrate, the alderman or
burgh-grieve,6 but we hear of his existence from law-
codes rather than as an actual official in being. The
vernacular term provest displaced alderman much later,7
1 Burgh Rees. Socy. Misc., xxxviii-xxxix, 53-157.
* A.P.S., II, 349 ; III, 43. Edin. Rees., II, 258-9.
3 A.P.S., IV, 30 ; VII, 510 ; IX, 309. Cf. Erskine, Inst, of Law of Scot.
(ed. 1838), 235.
4 Generally rendered hallivi, but sometimes prepositi. A.P.S., I, 436,
720-1. Reg. Vetus de Aberbrothoc, I, 55. Hay, Hist, of Arbroath, 104.
Glas. Charters, I (ii), 19. At Aberdeen, though the baihes are prepositi in
the thirteenth century, they are ballivi as early as 1310. Kennedy, Annals
of Aberd., I, 14. Reg. Epis. Aberd., I, 41. Cf. the change in the Exchequer
rolls, noted supra, xvii n. 2. Murray, Early Burgh Organisation, I, 163
n. 4, notes a similar change at Glasgow.
5 A.P.S., I, 333, 337, 356, 680-3, 704.
® Here, too, the Latin term is normally prepositus. Ib., 333-4, 336,
339-40, 344, 348, 353-4. But superior burgi and aldirmannus are each used
once : ib., 355, 693.
7 At Glasgow in 1453 (Marwick, Early Glasgow, 17-8); at Edinburgh in
1456 (Edin. Rees., I, 41); in the Acts of Parliament in 1503/4 (II, 244-5).
The term alderman survived at Ayr and Selkirk till the reign of James V.