James by the grace of God king of Scots to all worthy men of his realm to whom the present letters shall come, greeting. Let it be known that of our special grace we have remitted to Alexander Irvine of Drum, James Lindsay, Gilbert Ross, William Cristisoun, John Glass, John Craigmyle, and Alexander Irvine son of Alexander Irvine of Strathdee, bearers of these present, our rancour of spirit, the royal suit, and all action that we conceived, have, or may in future have against them, that is [the first six men are named here] for the slaughter of the late Alexander Fraser and George Taylor, done out of forethought felony at the Brig o’ Balgownie, and for their art and part in the slaughter of the said men, as well as for receiving, assisting, and giving support to divers persons now at our horn; against the said Alexander Irvine of Drum and Alexander Irvine son of Alexander Irvine of Strathdee for the cruel dismemberment and mutilation of Master Edward Makdowell, chaplain, in his place of Drum; and for all other acts done or in any way perpetrated by the above-written persons committed down to the day of the writing of these [letters], excepting [all acts of] treason, murder, rape of women, and common theft howsoever done; provided that all make sufficient amends and satisfaction to the kindred and friends of the said Alexander, Edward, and George and other complaining parties that we may henceforth hear no lawful complaint concerning the same. Further, we firmly prohibit anyone [injured] by reason of the said killing from presuming to inflict on the said persons, now under our firm peace and protection, any kind of harm, annoyance, injury or grievance, or from threatening their lives, under threat of our full forfeiture and loss of life and limbs. In testimony of this act, we have made patent under our great seal these our letters of remission, to remain valid for the duration of the lifetimes of the forementioned persons. [Given] at Edinburgh on the nineteenth day of July in the year of our Lord 1487 and the twenty-seventh of our reign.^[2]

The language of this document situates the king’s pardon of the Irvine gang at the nexus of several areas of scholarly enquiry. Most obviously, the letter sheds valuable light on the sorts of offences that the later medieval Scottish crown was prepared to forgive—some of them, clearly, of the most grievous kind.^[3] The guilty parties’ success in purchasing a reprieve from the severe personal and financial consequences of their actions would appear also to confirm scholarly consensus regarding the Stewarts’ abuse of the judicial prerogatives inherent in the royal office.^[4] The process by which Irvine and his fellows secured their pardon, by means of a royal warrant directed to the keeper of the privy seal and thence to the chancellor and his clerks for sealing and enrolment, supports the findings of historians who have argued in favour of an increasing specialization of secretarial departments within the royal administration in this period.^[5] Finally, the gruesome crimes that the letter of pardon describes reminds readers of the challenges that the late medieval and early modern Scottish crown and its judicial agents confronted in cases such as this, when a gang of felons consisting of persons of noble rank banded together with lesser tenants and other hangers-on to commit feud in the name of family honour.^[6]

While each of these strands of enquiry has attracted scholarly discussion, still another feature of James III’s pardon remains largely unexplored, notably the language and the structure of the letter in which the king chose to express his act of clemency. Recent studies of the rhetorical styles used in petitions in medieval Britain and Europe have argued for a thriving culture of legal writing in the later Middle Ages and highlighted the profound influence of contemporary institutions of law, government, and justice “in defining the language and form” of written supplications.^[7] The purpose of this article is not to examine petitions for pardon to the Scottish crown, for these survive only very rarely before 1550, but rather to explore the language and form of Scottish letters of remission, as pardons issuing out of the Scottish chancellor’s office were known. Each and every clause included in royal letters of remission echoed developments in the legal and political landscape of the kingdom. Similarly, each of the clauses written into the remission of 1487 and the language of royal mercy itself reflect the unique history of violent crime and its prosecution in the medieval kingdom of the Scots.

There survive from the years between 1300 and 1550 several hundred royal letters of remission that grant the king’s pardon in the context of a range of serious offences; they are scattered throughout the private archives of noble and lairdly families as well as in the records of the various departments of the Scottish chancery and exchequer. In the later thirteenth century, clerks in the employ of the royal chapel were only just learning to shape the texts of public instruments in language that would unambiguously project and sustain the Scottish crown’s claims to power and authority. By the end of the period under examination here, grants of the royal prerogative of mercy had become routine—if sometimes unpopular—aspects of the judicial process, and letters of remission, drafted according to strict chancery formula in closely prescribed language, were available to most felons as a matter of course (if almost always for a steep price). This article examines several of the clauses that, by the later Middle Ages, had become standard features of Scottish letters of pardon. It explores, first, the contexts in which each of these clauses came to be regarded as an essential component of a properly executed grant of royal mercy, then turns to a discussion of the enduring primacy of the Latin language in the composition and drafting of royal acts of pardon.

The King’s Peace and the King’s Grace

James III’s pardon of the outrages committed at the Brig’ o Balgownie represented an act of royal grace, a gift of the divinely inspired clemency with which medieval political thought endowed sovereign rulers the length and breadth of Europe. James III’s power to forgive condemned felons rested on theoretical foundations that were already venerable in 1487. In Scotland, direct association between the office of the king and the divinely ordained power to pardon was almost as old as the practice of administrative writing itself. David I (1124–53), Malcolm IV (1153–65), and William I (1165–1214) all habitually reminded their subjects of their God-given status to rule when they used the style “king by the grace of God” (Dei gratia rex) in the opening sentences of their written acts.^[8] After 1174, partly in imitation of practice then current in the sophisticated Angevin chancery of neighbouring England, but perhaps also in a deliberate effort to reassert among his own subjects the integrity of his royal title following his capture at Alnwick and the humiliating terms of his release, William I invariably used the style, as did all his successors.^[9] Despite the fact that they did not enjoy the rite of unction in the thirteenth century,^[10] Scotland’s rulers determinedly—and remarkably successfully—set about casting the illusion of divine sanction around the office of the king. All, even the thoroughly disgraced King John Balliol (forced to abdicate in July 1296), claimed that they ruled by, and had the authority to dispense, the grace of God.

Clerical advisors, both at home and in distant Rome, repeatedly reminded the kings of Scotland of their obligation to keep the peace among their subjects.^[11] Such assertions generated potent ideological links between the power to judge and the power to punish, and William I, and later his son Alexander II, were more than willing to use these powers. If, in the early thirteenth century, their claims to a broad and comprehensive authority over the people they governed remained largely aspirational, by the closing years of Alexander’s reign courts competent to hear allegations of all sorts of breaches of the peace had been established in most of the realm.^[12] Acts of royal grace in favour of condemned offenders offered powerful reminders of the king’s ability to override the normal, and often brutal, course of justice.^[13]

Formal letters of remission, which begin to appear in considerable numbers in the fourteenth century, reproduced almost verbatim clauses found in the earliest Scottish brieves of protection. The common law of medieval Scotland developed along lines very different from that of England, but fundamental to both was the notion that unlawful acts constituted breaches of the king’s peace and responsibility for their punishment was the ultimate preserve of the crown. The notion that the king’s peace embraced all his subjects—and, by extension, the king’s power to condemn or forgive those of his subjects who violated that peace—informs early Scottish legislative texts and is made explicit in hundreds of written grants that the later medieval kings of Scots issued in favour of their landholding subjects, lay and clerical. Clauses of protection in these grants bestowed on the beneficiary (and his or her possessions) the king’s protection and threatened with sanction any who violated it.^[14] Collectively, the written protections emanating from the king’s writing office played a crucial role in shaping contemporary understandings of the king’s power to protect, to punish, and to forgive.

Scottish brieves of protection, like the English writs upon which they were modelled, were, initially at least, short, simple, written orders issued at the command of the king on behalf of a beneficiary. In effect, they brought that beneficiary into a special relationship with the king and transformed violations of that person’s possessions and privileges into offences against the king himself. Royal promises to enforce violations against the king’s peace and protection generated vigorous demand for legal instruments that would enable litigants to resolve a variety of disputes alleging breach of that peace.^[15] The maturation of brieve-based litigation and rising demand for the court-based resolution of disputes prompted clerks in the employ of both the king and his great barons to expand the scope and the circumstances under which injured parties might defend challenges to their persons and possessions. In the thirteenth century, moreover, there developed alongside the emerging brieve rules a series of procedures designed to uncover and resolve violent disputes by means of inquest by an assize of local men (the visnet). While many offences in medieval Scotland were justiciable in baronial courts, the crown reserved to the adjudication of its own sheriffs and justiciars the so-called “pleas of the crown”: secret killing, rape, fire-raising, and robbery.^[16]

Almost certainly by the closing years of the thirteenth century the routine business of the king’s writing office (the capella regis) included the drafting of letters that remitted serious offences. A clause in the Treaty of Perth of 1266, for example, by which the king of Scots assumed control over the western isles from the king of Norway, distinguished offenders eligible for the royal gracia from those who were not.^[17] These terms emphasized Alexander III’s authority over his new subjects and, even if they did not willy-nilly effect immediate legal change in these new parts of the realm of Scotland,^[18] several passages in the treaty made it clear that henceforth all letters of protection and grants of royal pardon in the region would originate in—or be withheld by—the writing office of the king of Scots alone. A generation later, the proposals drawn up for the governance of Scotland under the Maid of Norway and her proposed husband specified that all royal “letters of grace” issuing out of the capella regis in the couple’s names must conform to the customary practices of “the king’s chapel and the realm of Scotland.”^[19] Precisely what constituted “custom” in the capella regis of the late thirteenth century remains poorly documented, but there is little doubt that by the end of the reign of Alexander III professional scribes in the king’s employ were both keeping careful record of acts running in the king’s name, and were deploying their secretarial skills in a host of contexts.^[20] That letters of pardon were normally initiated by a royal command under the privy seal is suggested in a brief treatise, believed to have been written between 1292 and 1296, that describes the responsibilities of the Scottish king’s household officers.^[21] The treatise reveals that fees for the purchase of “letters of grace” (including pardons) had by then been established.^[22]

The tumultuous years following the Battle of Bannockburn produced a flurry of legislation and a considerable body of juridical writing designed to underpin the legitimacy of Robert I’s seizure of the throne in 1306 and to project support for a ruler guilty of the shocking offences of sacrilege and homicide.^[23] A series of royal acts issued in the parliamentary session of 1318 set the seal on a vigorous programme of reform to existing laws and legal procedures.^[24] The changes that Bruce effected, as well as those that he and his counsellors envisioned, were extensive enough to prompt one practising lawyer to revise and update an early compendium of older Scots law (the lawbook now generally referred to as Capitula assissarum et statutorum domini Dauid regis Scocie),^[25] and another to set to work on a comprehensive digest and analysis of Scots law, the first of its kind in Scotland, the treatise known as Regiam Maiestatem. Yet another lawyer set about reorganizing from scattered parchment sheets the so-called Ayr Formulary, an updated and expanded collection of brieves and judicial letters available to contemporary Scottish litigants.^[26]

Several of the legal instruments now regularly issuing out of Bruce’s capella regis were designed to deal with the adjudication of “criminal” offences, especially incidents of homicide and theft. Close comparison of the terminology found in the earliest extant royal assizes and brieve forms dating to the late twelfth and the thirteenth centuries with the wording of brieves and letters of protection reworked, revised, and updated under Bruce’s direction demonstrates the extent to which Robert I articulated and promoted an expansive interpretation of the king’s power to pardon. The lawbook known as Leges Scocie (LS), for example, preserves the texts of royal assizes dating to the reigns of William I and Alexander II.^[27] Several of the severe punitive clauses in LS that refer vaguely to forfeitures owed the crown were revised in the updated, Bruce-era revisions to include statements that placed offenders firmly and unequivocally “in the king’s mercy.”^[28] These passages leave little doubt that acts of clemency on the part of the king had the power to protect even the most hardened miscreants from the consequences of harsh punishment. The Ayr Formulary includes the texts of a handful of “typical” letters of remission widely available to Bruce-era offenders guilty of unlawful killing, as well as exemplars of other judicial letters available to killers who had been readmitted to the comfort of the king’s peace thanks to an act of royal clemency.^[29] The texts of pardons that Robert I granted to William earl of Ross in 1308 and to Sir Gilbert of Carrick in 1309, in fact, bear a close resemblance to the updated terminology found in the Ayr Formulary. Both make specific mention of the gracia speciali that moved the king to forgive.^[30] Robert I’s claims to supreme jurisdiction over all who dared to flout his laws had enduring consequences for the form and structure of Scottish letters of remission. From the 1320s through 1550, and well beyond, the texts of letters of pardon invariably recalled the divinely inspired royal gracia, and sometimes even the “special” royal grace (gracia speciali), that moved a king—but a king alone—to set aside the normal consequences of violent law-breaking.^[31]

Rancour of Spirit and the Royal Suit

Medieval letters of remission from Scotland almost always include a statement that associated unlawful acts with an escalation of the king’s anger and an excess of royal “rancour of spirit.”^[32] During the reign of Robert I, clerks in the royal employ experimented with this phrase, occasionally referring instead to the rancour that resides in the king’s “heart,”^[33] but by the middle years of the fourteenth century clauses referring to the king’s “rancour of spirit” had become standard features of royal pardon texts. This phrase, too, was borrowed directly from contemporary English chancery exempla, but its ready adoption in Scotland reflects more generally the extent to which the king of Scots and his advisors were in close touch with broader intellectual currents in theology and political theory then circulating in Europe. Indeed, recent scholarship leaves little doubt about the pervasive influence of canonist thought on thirteenth-century Scottish legislation.^[34]

European theologians of the thirteenth century discussed at length the relationship between sin and crime on the one hand and, on the other, the notion of iustitia, that is, the condign punishment of serious offenders. Among the many consequences of these discussions was the genesis of a vast literature devoted to arguments that justified royal anger.^[35] Much of this literature was designed to instruct Christian princes on the means of ensuring that their legal systems fulfilled the divine obligation to temper earthly justice with mercy. The vice known as “rancour of spirit” (rancor animi) had featured prominently in the writings of Augustine of Hippo, Theodore archbishop of Canterbury and, latterly, Burchard of Worms, ^[36] with the twelfth century witnessing not only “a renaissance of royal anger,” but renewed discussion of the ways in which princely rulers might licitly express feelings of anger.^[37] Aquinas eventually achieved some consensus among scholastic thinkers when he argued that anger or rancour based on the good judgment of reason (rather than mere dislike or hate) was not merely acceptable in a king, but necessary to promote good order.^[38] In Scotland, the discussions of canonists and theologians on the problematic nature of royal rancor, iustitia, and clemencia had a marked influence on the laws and customs by which the later medieval kings governed their subjects and managed the resolution of their disputes. The inspiration of the church is apparent in Alexander II’s readiness in the 1230s to adopt new terms to describe violent offences, and in the introduction of new legal procedures, borrowed from canonist practice, for dealing with the violence inherent in acts of robbery.^[39] So, too, is it evident—far more extensively than once thought—in the underpinnings of the early fourteenth-century legal treatise, Regiam Maiestatem.^[40] It was in the context of similar discussions about “rulership practice”^[41] and the role of anger in royal justice that the king’s rancor animi came to occupy a central place in letters of remission.

It is always rancor, however, rather than ira or any other term for anger, that appears in letters of remission. Rancour was, of course, a form of anger, but one that had particular resonance in a realm where the king governed not entirely on his own initiative, but rather in close (and usually beneficial) partnership with men who had taken personal oaths of fealty to him, and who assumed responsibility for their own kinsmen and tenants. Unlawful acts by any of the king’s subjects breached that fealty and threatened the integrity of the bond that united king and subject, generating in the royal mind a potentially dangerous form of anger rooted in bitterness, resentment, animosity, and grudge.^[42] The rancour that divided king and subject, similar in nature to the enmity that divided feuding families, might be laid to rest with an act of grace on the part of the injured king. The language of the opening clauses of each and every royal letter of remission deliberately recalled the language of contemporary feud in its reference to the king’s rancour and enmity; in similar fashion, the written promise of the king’s renewed peace and protection that constituted the closing clauses of letters of remission signalled the abandonment of that rancour, the renewal of amity, and the formal settlement of the king’s feud with a wayward subject. There are, in fact, striking parallels between the language of rancour and reconciliation penned into royal letters of remission and that found in the letters of slains by which the king’s subjects signalled the formal end of their feuds.

Robert I’s views on the nature of his royal authority were deeply informed not only by the advice of learned clerics who advised him, but by the political turmoil that had followed his seizure of the throne. Those views were far more than merely aspirational. The judgment of forfeiture and perpetual disinheritance against any and all who refused to come to the king’s fealty enacted in the Cambuskenneth parliament of November 1314, and the legal reforms promulgated in the meeting of the Estates in 1318, together made clear statements about the severe consequences that attended breaches of the king’s (now more expansively defined) peace.^[43] Bruce’s legislation may well have been crafted specifically to promote the majesty and legitimacy of his dynasty, given the violent circumstances under which he had taken the throne.^[44] But those enactments also represented an act of royal reconciliation with old enemies, a settlement, it might be said, of the longstanding feud that had divided Bruce’s supporters and his opponents. One of the enduring legacies of the king’s legal reforms was the juxtaposition, in all subsequent medieval letters of remission, of the king’s rancour and the king’s clemency.

Offenders fortunate enough to secure the king’s pardon won not only freedom from physical punishment but, of far greater value, immunity from further prosecution by the king or his judicial agents in respect of those misdeeds. Much like early brieves of protection, letters of remission authenticated with the Great Seal of the realm signalled publicly the reconciliation of an errant subject with the king and, in no uncertain terms, prohibited anyone from attempting to pursue further vengeance in respect of that offence. The warning clause penned into each and every pardon thus left no doubt among the kindred and friends of a victim that, as long as they had been properly assythed (compensated) for the loss and wrong they had suffered, any attempt to perpetuate the dispute—in the courts by means of further plaints, by harassment or, most seriously, by resorting to violence—entailed the severe legal consequence of forfeiture or death. In 1550 the crown and its judicial and political advisors were still many years away from resolving the tumultuous consequences of a noble society that actively embraced “private violence and feuding.”^[45] But, in ensuring that their letters of remission offered offenders comprehensive royal protection while they made condign reparation to the families and kindred of their victims, the later medieval rulers of Scots proved remarkably adept at inserting themselves into the process of dispute resolution. In exercising its authority, the crown successfully gave expression to its role as the “senior partner” in the judicial processes of the Scottish kingdom.^[46]

The “Exception” Clause

James III was apparently willing to forgive the Irvine gang their outrages at the Brig o’ Balgownie, but his letter of remission in no way absolved the culprits of all responsibility for their misdeeds. James made sure that members of Irvine’s criminal band—and anyone who consorted with them—understood this fact by including in his letter of remission a clause that specifically excluded from his grace any additional (irremissible) offences that its members might have committed in the course of, or since, the original outrage. The inclusion of such a clause distinguishes Scottish letters of remission from those issued by other European princes.

By the early fifteenth century, exception clauses such as that found in the Irvine pardon had acquired the patina of legal antiquity, and thereafter they appear in virtually all Scottish letters of remission issuing out of chancery. Although the lists of excepted offences varied from one letter to another, collectively they were anything but random, for behind each and every one lay a long history of contested discussion in parliament about the extent of the king’s authority to pardon. In James III’s time, theoretically at least, the crown’s power to punish the offences of treason, robbery (often described as rapine), fire-raising, and rape was seldom challenged: these crimes had for centuries already been considered “pleas of the crown,” and their trial and punishment the particular responsibility of the king himself and his judicial agents, the justiciars. There remained, however, vigorous debate in parliament about the king’s authority to pardon in matters of homicide. From the 1350s until well into the sixteenth century, discussions in the Estates, some of them heated, centred not on a juridical definition of homicidal killing, but rather on wider issues associated with the endemic violence of the period (notably the feud), and specifically on who had ultimate jurisdiction over such offenders.^[47] An habitual bone of contention had been, and remained in James III’s time, the readiness of the crown to pardon violent killers of all sorts in return for solid financial profits—those very lucrative “chancery fees” and “offerings” (they were seldom called “fines”) that suspects offered in return for the king’s pardon.^[48] In the late Middle Ages the Scottish crown proved largely successful in preserving its authority to pardon (and to profit from) instances of unlawful killing, but the exclusion clauses that became standard features of royal letters of remission reveal that ultimately the crown ceded to lords in parliament the right to define remissible crimes, including homicide.^[49]

Latin as the Language of the King’s Justice

The hundreds of documents that record grants of royal clemency in the late medieval period demonstrate to good effect, even in the midst of significant linguistic fluctuation, the enduring authority of the Latin language. Recent research on later medieval communication strategies in Europe has tended to emphasize the richly polyglot nature of late medieval writing practices, urban, rural, and royal.^[50] This view argues that despite a long-enduring respect for the Latin language among record-keepers and other fonctionnaires at the heart of royal and princely governments, by 1300 everywhere in the medieval West Latin was being “regularly contested by other languages of real or putative authority.”^[51] Generally speaking, the linguistic landscape of medieval Scotland reflects these trends. In the last few decades a veritable explosion of research has examined the formative years and the early dissemination of works written in the Scots vernacular in a wide variety of contexts. Manuscripts containing secular poetry, chronicles, and devotional work begin to appear in the later fourteenth century; by the middle years of the fifteenth, Old Scots was widely regarded as the language of choice in which to compose and disseminate advice to princes literature.^[52] Scholars have no reason to doubt, either, that the spoken language in which merchants, craftsmen and business owners of all ranks (and both genders) conducted their affairs in the burghs of Scotland had from the very beginning accommodated the vernacular,^[53] and from the late fourteenth century, clerks in the employ of burgh and barony courts commonly recorded litigation and other legal proceedings in varying forms of hybrid Latin-Scots.^[54] A hundred years later, but not much earlier (and thus considerably later than in England and much later still than in France),^[55] the vernacular had acquired some currency within the inner circle of the king’s administration, with precepts destined for sealing under the Privy Seal often written in Scots.^[56] The same period saw the introduction of the vernacular to non-royal charters, indentures, leases, and other legal instruments, all penned in a rough (and, as one commentator has noted, “in no sense literary”) approximation in Scots of their Latin originals.^[57] By 1400, moreover, it would appear that courtroom practice itself was highly accommodating of multilingual pleading.^[58] Almost certainly, the choice of language in these venues reflected the preference of the pursuers, defenders and pleaders alike and, by extension, the growing confidence in the legal authority of the vernacular among propertied people of all ranks.

And yet, in late medieval Scotland, Latin retained its primacy as the language of the sovereign, of his justice, and especially of his mercy. It was precisely because he fully grasped the symbolic authority of the Latin language that after 1314, when he set about re-establishing the independent status of the kingdom of the Scots, Robert I sought to ensure that charters emanating from the king’s writing office, statutes enacted in his parliaments, and all manner of other royal business be recorded in Latin, as they had always been in the time of the predecessors from whom he was so determined to claim descent. Bruce’s long-serving chancellor Bernard of Arbroath initiated a rigorous reorganization of the royal chapel that saw the first efforts to systematically record all documents passed under the Great Seal and was therefore responsible for the earliest exemplars of the Register of the Great Seal.^[59] Two hundred years later, the babble in which the Scottish people conducted their everyday business may well have changed in both urban and rural settings, but Latin remained the language of sovereign authority, as well as the lingua franca of the king’s administration. Moreover, manuscripts containing Latin texts of the Auld Lawes, the burgh laws, the laws of the forest and the sea, the laws governing the Anglo-Scottish marches and, above all, the law digests Regiam Maiestatem and Quoniam Attachiamenta not only continued to circulate in the kingdom long after 1400; they were still being copied for the benefit of both students and practising lawyers.^[60] While efforts were eventually made to translate most of these books of Auld Law into the vernacular, these were sporadic, and Latin copies of these texts and treatises continued to be made, and to be regarded as authoritative, well into the seventeenth century. The much written-about Education Act of 1496 (although itself, ironically, drafted in Scots) explicitly linked the good order of the realm with the ability of the king’s justices to command the “perfite Latyne” that practice of the law required.^[61] Those same lawmen were devoting increasing energy to actively preserving the integrity of the Latin-language charters that were the foundation of title to land, and the brieves by which legal actions commenced. The treatise known as De Composicione cartarum, found in at least eleven of the Auld Law compilations and probably written in the mid-fifteenth century, was intended as a vademecum for students and lawyers, instructing them on the proper way to draft legal instruments and on how to avoid making mistakes in the use of technical language.^[62] The outcome of judicial proceedings in the second half of the fifteenth century occasionally turned on the admissibility of charters, letters, and other documents that had not been “made in due form,” and the proper drafting of legal instruments was a notable preoccupation of contemporary Lords Auditors of Causes and Complaints.^[63]

Concern among lawmen for the integrity of Latin represented more than just pedantic cavilling. In the period between 1350 and 1550 enduring tradition perpetuated the close association between the Latin language and the formal communication of the king’s will to his subjects, especially in matters relating to royal jurisdiction. The later medieval monarchs appear to have taken seriously the advice first proffered in the late thirteenth century, then repeated in the late fourteenth, that a well governed realm was one in which the chancellor, as keeper of the great seal, exercised “wisdom, knowledge, and good discretion” in the drafting of royal documents, including royal letters of remission.^[64] That wisdom included a profound respect for the authority of the Latin language, the language of the Roman and canonist traditions that later medieval chancery clerks acknowledged as constituting the very foundation of late medieval Scots law. Indeed, so powerful was the association between Latinity and the public exercise of the king’s will that, with little exception, it remained the language of royal acts enrolled in the Register of the Great Seal until well into the nineteenth century.

Conclusion

In what Jackson Armstrong has aptly described as the “complex mechanism of royal mercy” in Scotland,^[65] persons accused of committing criminal offences had a good prospect of obtaining letters of pardon both before and after they appeared before royal justiciars to answer for their misdeeds. Moreover, as long as they had formally agreed to offer assythment to victims and their families, they could approach the king’s chancellor directly in order to purchase such letters. Prudent miscreants made sure to secure these well in advance of dittay and trial. Poorer felons, or more reckless persons, faced with an unfavourable verdict at visitations of the ayre, had the opportunity to “compone” (make arrangements) with commissioners specially empowered to sit with the justices in ayre, and undertake there to make reparation to victims in order to purchase pardons. At the conclusion of the normal course of justice, offenders who succeeded in obtaining letters of remission were inevitably poorer in pocket, but the exclusion clauses penned into their remissions assured them virtual indemnity from further prosecution in respect of their misdeeds.^[66]

The plentiful survival of petitions for royal and princely pardon in several European realms has allowed scholars to examine closely the “rhetorical and legal strategies inspired by epistolary manuals and chancery formularies” employed by French, Burgundian and English miscreants in their efforts to plead for royal mercy.^[67] Similar analyses are simply not possible for medieval Scotland. There can be little doubt that Scottish law breakers had the right to petition the king for pardon, and good evidence that they did so; sometimes they received remissions after the Scottish queen herself, or a great lord, had interceded with the king on their behalf. ^[68] Unfortunately for historians, Scottish legal custom did not require that the contents of petitions for mercy be embedded in the text of royal letters of remission. The inability of scholars to study and analyze the epistolatory strategies that offenders employed to secure the attention of the Scottish king and his judicial officers makes the study of pardoning in late medieval Scotland a challenging prospect and very much a one-sided affair. The formulaic clauses that comprise the hundreds of letters of remission that remain extant from the years between 1350 to 1550 nevertheless offer valuable insight into the ideological underpinnings of the medieval Scottish crown’s claims to supremacy in matters relating to the law of the realm.