The ‘lockman’, or public executioner, forms a shadowy figure in histories of early modern Scotland. He stands namelessly on the scaffold alongside the noted rebels, accused ‘witches’, and others so often written about by historians as he enacted the penalties dealt by well-studied systems and regimes. Most often, he is nameless in both primary and secondary literature alike: ‘the lockman’; ‘the hangman’; ‘the executer’. It is even easy to overlook the lockman's existence as a real person or, rather, a series of individuals whose lives were united by employment in a grisly role that their contemporaries deemed brutally undesirable, yet simultaneously imperative for maintenance of law and order. Considering their existence in the context of these contradictory social demands, this essay uses three core case studies to explore the lockman's role and his relationship to the community he served, underscoring the need to appreciate such marginal characters in order to better understand early modern Scottish society as a whole.

Named after the ‘lock’, or small measure, of meal he was conventionally entitled to from each sack in the local marketplace, the lockman was responsible for a variety of grim, arduous roles. Contemporary records note lockmen clearing latrines and recovering corpses, as well as constructing gallows, pillories, and other apparatus of public punishment. Precise duties often varied, but one common task was driving ‘uncouth beggars’ from burgh or parish bounds. At Edinburgh, Dumfries, and many other towns, lockmen were also commonly responsible for cleaning the blood of slaughtered animals spilt in marketplaces, and killing nuisance stray dogs, cats, and swine. On occasion, therefore, the role may have overlapped with that of skinner, as was far more common elsewhere in Europe. As in Germany, Scottish lockmen also occupied the pseudo-legal role of torturer, an apparent contradiction only further entrenched with time since, by the end of the eighteenth century, the position of executioner often became merged with the court office of dempster.

It was the enacting of corporal and capital punishment, however, for which the executioner was best known and by which, indeed, he continues to be defined.

Early modern religious institutions were undeniably patriarchal. The Scottish Kirk vested men with religious authority, and expected women to subjugate themselves before both God and their husbands. Visions of John Knox raging about monstrous regiments, or the notion that the witch hunts were primarily a mechanism by which the Kirk policed women's sexuality, have shaped popular conceptions of post-Reformation religion and gender. As Callum G. Brown explores, early waves of scholarship similarly envisaged post-Reformation Scotland as an ‘empire of patriarchy’ in which both theology and ecclesiastical structures perpetuated the ‘demonisation of women’. However, historiography since the 1980s has painted a more nuanced picture. Kirk sessions worked to protect women as well as punishing them, and many ministers – including Knox – had circles of female confidants. In a discussion of the role of women in Scottish divinity between 1590 and 1640, David Mullan highlights women's role in protests, and suggests that women ‘had a real impact on other women and on men through their spiritual counsel’. In her analysis of the Covenanting movement, Louise Yeoman similarly underlines how women participated both in prayer groups and in riots, with Presbyterianism promoting ‘a brand of female activism and assertion which is rarely seen in other seventeenth century contexts’. Against a backdrop of conflict, early Covenanters encouraged zealous devotion to the cause, and exalted godliness above all – a democratising approach, for men and women from across the social spectrum might be redeemed by God's grace. The relative stability of the early eighteenth century furnished fewer opportunities for women to take on the mantle of saintliness, but both sexes continued to debate and resist the status quo in prayer societies, as Alasdair Raffe has demonstrated. Thereafter, the evangelical revivals of the 1740s captivated a largely female audience with fresh promises of glorification. Ecclesiastical structures and teachings upheld gendered hierarchies, but religion nevertheless offered some degree of empowerment.

The difficulty of assessing whether religion was a liberating or constraining force is thrown into stark relief when we consider spiritual writing. Before the eighteenth century, Scotswomen's reading and writing almost exclusively focused on religious topics.8 The project of spiritual growth legitimised – indeed necessitated – the act of self-reflection. In his study of autobiographical writing by Scots born in the early eighteenth century or before, Mullan identifies some fifty works, of which sixteen were produced by women.

In August 1636, Henry Ghretsone, a skipper and ‘stranger’, complained that, while he had previously ‘belived that the Scottes had bene gude people’, he had now changed his mind. His volte-face resulted from an incident that had occurred while he was sailing towards Dumbarton from Glasgow. Another boat, carrying many heavily-armed men, attacked him, shooting multiple holes in his sails before taking him captive. Having dragged him ashore, they demanded customs dues that he could not afford to pay, and he was accordingly held in prison for a number of days until somebody else agreed to pay the fees on his behalf. Such treatment of strangers, Ghretsone protested, ‘will do wholl Scotland no gude’. Ghretsone's experience spoke to the fraught and uncertain place of the ‘incomer’ in early modern society, a society rooted in the ideal that people ought to live in settled, relatively non-porous communities. This theoretical standard, however, did not match reality: early modern people in fact moved around readily and frequently, as a substantial body of scholarship now readily attests. Within a specifically Scottish context, however, migration as a research theme remains unevenly developed. While there is a very considerable stock of work elucidating the experiences of Scots moving to other parts of the globe, we remain surprisingly under-informed about mobility within and to Scotland itself, especially before 1700.

Our lack of detailed knowledge notwithstanding, there is a general recognition within the scholarship that ‘strangers’, as they were typically termed, whether in the form of vagrants, economic migrants, professional people, or foreign visitors like Henry Ghretsone, were very often marginalised figures, their activities subject to significant restriction and their socio-economic opportunities curtailed – as, indeed, has tended to be the general experience of ‘outsiders’ in other geographical and temporal contexts. Building on these tentative foundations, this chapter seeks to interrogate the basis and nature of migrants’ social marginality in early modern Scotland, focusing especially on seventeenth-century evidence. It begins by discussing the various challenges that migrants and immigrants were thought to pose for their host communities, before moving on to survey the mechanisms – some formal, some not – by which such individuals were confined to the fringes. It then assesses how, and why, this marginal status might be challenged or mitigated.

‘The colliers, in all countries, are generally an unruly set of labourers; and those of this work were like their neighbours.’ So declared the minister of Alloa in his 1793 entry into the Statistical Account of Scotland when describing the coal mine which had been in operation there since around 1623. The minister recorded that he had recently observed a reformation among the colliers, who had hitherto only been ‘remarkable for their ignorance and dissoluteness of manners’. The catalyst for this reformation in the colliers’ moral character was the so-called (partial) ‘emancipation’ of forced or bound labour in 1775, albeit this was not fully abolished until 1799. This concept of miners’ wildness has often been accepted in the topic's limited historiography, which tends to focus mainly on the eighteenth century. It can be boiled down to two main schools of thought. The more traditional school has tended to focus on parliamentary statutes on collier serfdom in addition to court cases concerning these. Such scholarship largely takes a high industry approach, rather than focusing on mine workers. Contrarily, the more recent, revisionist school, inspired by both social history and history from below, has focused on manuscript sources. In doing so it has uncovered colliers’ independent action and active engagement with the legal system. However, this has been rooted mostly in limited use of account books (largely confined to the Clerks of Penicuik's voluminous records) and reactionary modes of collier agency, tending to exalt the proto-capitalist diversification of the mine own- ers rather than focusing on the influence of the workers in that respect. Also, both schools have concentrated chiefly on male colliers, without sufficient weight being given to those workers, especially coal bearers, who were often women or children.

Scottish coal mine workers of the early modern period can be difficult to trace through primary sources. Civil and church court records are excellent sources for following these people, but by their very nature they rely on actionable offences being carried out or at least suspected. Utilising just this source-base may lead to skewed conclusions which buy into the depictions of coal mine workers as they appear in statute. Coal mine account books, which became increasingly regularised and widespread in the later seventeenth century, offer different perspectives. They are invaluable sources, but are too often tantalisingly laconic, simply recording payments in and out of the mine.

At the end of the section of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur that P. J. C. Field titles ‘Uther Pendragon and Merlin’, Arthur famously has a group of infants slain, all to avert a prophecy that one of them – born on May Day (46.8–10) – will eventually destroy his kingdom (36.15–17). One of these children is Mordred, who survives the deliberate shipwreck and who, the reader is told, will be seen coming to Arthur's court ‘as hit rehersith aftirward and towarde the ende of the Morte Arthure’ (46.18–19). This apparent promise to tell the story of how Mordred arrives at Arthur's court is never kept. Mordred in fact appears throughout the Tales of Lancelot and Tristram, the very middle of the Morte, but he is already an established knight by that time. It might be that what Malory signals here is that the end of the Morte will involve Mordred, as is traditional and central to the Arthurian legend, but his wording seems very specific, and this would also not be the only narrative promise Malory makes early in his book and then fails to keep. In 2019, Elizabeth Archibald published an article dealing with Malory's apparently broken promise. Entitled ‘Mordred's Lost Childhood’, the article was part of a special issue of the journal Arthuriana dedicated to ‘Malorian and Scholarly Retraction’. In a fundamental sense, the retraction article is a long-awaited answer to a question she herself posed in 2002: ‘So what about Mordred's recognition scene?’

This interest in Mordred and his destiny, indeed his childhood, also occurs in conversation. I recall discussing, to take one example, the cover of Haydn Middleton's The King's Evil (1995), the first book in Middleton's Mordred Cycle trilogy. The cover depicts a naked young man, curled in a fetal position against what appears to be a pitch-black background. Held to the light, the cover reveals that the background is not an empty black but rather filled with the glossy outlines of dead babies, the victims of Arthur's plan. Mordred is a haunted figure, vulnerable rather than villainous, traumatized by his father's murderous actions.

The domestic sphere was the basis of early modern Scottish society. It was the place where a person ate, drank, worked, prayed, and slept. To complete the ordinary tasks of living, members of the household negotiated the space of the house and the surrounding area. The heads of the household, usually a husband and wife, held responsibility for their dependants, including the provision of care, which fell mostly to the housewife to accomplish. Depending on the wealth and needs of the household, dependants could comprise children, servants, animals, or all three. It was where people lived, including people with disabilities.

Discussions of disability have influenced British historical studies from at least the 1990s. Since then, disability historians have worked to bring people with disabilities into the historical narrative. A large amount of the resulting disability history focuses on the nineteenth century with its increased documentation and urbanisation. Scholars have looked earlier, however, using creativity and a variety of sources to find a relatively hidden portion of a population. For example, monster studies has been used to make sense of the historical position of the disabled. These scholars are careful to emphasise that using this lens is not intended to conflate the categories of ‘disabled’ and ‘monster’. Rather, they contend that disability can be found encoded in descriptions of the monstrous in pre-modern Western Europe.

In Scotland, there are at present two major strands of early modern disability history. One is the care of those with disabilities. Christopher Langley devotes a chapter to disability in his Cultures of Care, exploring the interactions between ecclesiastical institutions and parishioners with disabilities during the seventeenth century. Langley looks at informal networks of care, but the construction of devoted sick hospitals and institutions in the late eighteenth century encouraged more formal care of those with disabilities. In his seminal book on madness, Rab Houston discusses this development, but also notes that studying disability helps scholars to understand how early modern Scottish people defined their own mental world in relation to those they deemed mentally incapable. This argument points to the second strand within Scottish disability studies, which highlights early modern and Enlightenment philosophical writing and its use of disability to help define what it is to be human.