In her study of “disorderly damsels” in the Aberdeen sheriff courts, Ewan investigated “whether women were more likely to act alone or with others, the role of family and household, [and] the types of victims.”^[9] This chapter asks similar questions about a set of central criminal court records to explore with whom women committed lethal and near-lethal assaults, in what contexts they were the victims of such attacks, how family and kinship networks played a role, and whether kinship with prominent landholding families extended legitimacy to women who committed violence in feud-like contexts. This chapter begins by situating the study in the context of recent scholarship. It then demonstrates the ways in which family relationships show up in justiciary court records and examines how status and gender framed women’s violence as legitimate or illegitimate in this period. Finally, the chapter concludes with an overview of its contributions to scholarship and directions for future research.

Kinship networks and relationships had ripple effects that touched nearly every aspect of life in premodern Scotland, including crime and deviance. Scholarship on the feud in Scotland has explored the degree to which complicated bonds of obligation influenced political, social, and economic relationships, as well as conflict resolution.^[10] Other studies have shed light on the role of kin networks in criminal and deviant behaviour on a smaller scale. Melissa Hollander has shown how family dynamics might be raised in the kirk session through “sanctions imposed on men who failed to fulfil their familial responsibilities.”^[11] J. R. D. Falconer has demonstrated that “multiple members of the same ‘household’ would be recorded in court records, and indeed, could be regarded as having committed crime as a unit.”^[12] Alice Glaze’s study of women’s networks in Canongate between 1600 and 1660 demonstrated how kin and friendship networks offered illicit support through harbouring “fugitives” and those deemed “outsiders” by kirk sessions and burgh courts.^[13] This study explores how kinship networks show up in cases of lethal and near-lethal violence in the kingdom’s central criminal court.

A critical source for the study of women and violence is the original manuscripts that record court business. The main sources of primary evidence for this paper are the records of the justiciary court and ayres that survived from 1493 to 1558.^[14] The broader arguments and conclusions are based primarily on a sample of 565 entries related to lethal and near-lethal assaults. Entries with homicide included either as the indicted offence or in details about intent were sampled roughly every fifth year beginning in 1493. Evidence from an earlier survey of the records that focused on all entries between 1524 and 1542 with women as perpetrators is included as anecdotal evidence and is not included in statistical calculations.^[15] The focus on women in the manuscripts is important because, with some exceptions, they are conspicuously absent from the print versions edited by antiquarian Robert Pitcairn.^[16] Furthermore, Pitcairn tended to include only concluded cases (e.g., pardons, convictions, and acquittals) and not those cases that frustratingly (and frequently) vanish from the records without resolution. In the manuscript sample, women are indeed scarce, named pannels in 4.7% and victims in 7.3% of the entries. Regarding the accused perpetrators, this fits with studies in other Scottish and European courts.^[17] For non-lethal assaults specifically, Ewan notes that women were involved in 7.5% to 30% of the cases heard in Scottish sheriff courts at various points in the sixteenth century.^[18] However, more than 90% of even this small number of women are absent from Pitcairn’s edition. The women in the sample are also difficult to trace in other print records, such as The Register of the Privy Seal of Scotland (RPSS); of the sampled entries that name women, only the murder of George Gill has a corresponding entry in RPSS that is unhelpfully unrelated to the woman accused in this case.^[19] While the sampling method imposes some limits on the study’s comprehensiveness, the focus on original archival sources takes steps toward remedying the gender bias of printed editions.

The cases pertain primarily to conflicts near the Scottish Borders and involve men and women from all levels of society. Due to the geographical focus of the records that have survived, the evidence is perhaps unfairly skewed toward offences committed within or involving individuals with ties to Ayrshire, the Scottish Borders, and the central Lowlands. Feud was common here and elsewhere throughout the realm, and conflicts in the Highlands also drew the crown’s focus despite the absence of extant court records for those regions. Regardless of geography, and, as discussed above, the individuals in these entries—pannels (accused), victims, and sureties (guarantors)—were overwhelmingly men of varying social rank, from titled nobility to unnamed pannels of uncertain social standing. While the cost of bringing cases to court was prohibitive for many, titled nobility, untitled landholders, members of the clergy, burgesses, and tradespeople are all well represented among those subjects who interacted with the court and associated ayres, which were in turn attended by clerks, sheriffs, holders of lay and ecclesiastical regality courts, the justiciar, his deputes and, frequently, the monarch or regent.^[20]

The justiciar was one of many magistrates who oversaw the many overlapping jurisdictions that characterized the realm’s judicial system in the sixteenth century. The “fragmented and layered” criminal jurisdictions able to try cases of lethal and near-lethal violence included the justice ayres and court, local sheriff courts, and franchise courts, including some barony, regality, and burgh courts who had been awarded the privilege.^[21] In each of these courts, jurisdiction over homicides and serious assaults varied according to circumstances, premeditation, status, and territory. In 1524, the system of ayres that had previously circulated throughout the southern part of the kingdom gained a central seat as a stationary court situated permanently in Edinburgh.^[22] At both local ayres and in the kingdom’s capital, the justiciar’s operations and priorities were influenced by social, economic, and political factors, all of which were affected by the nature of relationships between and within the powerful kin groups that organized Scottish society.

Family Relationships in the Justiciary Court Records

In justiciary court records, family relationships show up most often when pannels and victims are identified in relation to one another. The most common adjectives used to describe relationships in the 592 sampled entries were brother (60 instances), wife (52), junior (39),^[23] son (22), and daughter (15). The less common words used to indicate kinship were spouse (5), sister (4), mother (3), relict/widow (3), child/ren (3), nephew (2),^[24] uncle (1), and “cousin-german” (1). As in many Scottish court records from the same period, women are almost always identified through references to their husbands—sometimes only by reference to their husbands—or other relatives, including their parents and siblings.^[25] The terms aunt, parent, and husband did not appear in the sampled entries. If we expand the definition of kin to households and members of the extended kin group, we can also consider servant (25), follower (9), and kin (1) as keywords that denote relationships of real or fictive kinship. Given that the clerks tended to use various descriptors to identify the people in these records, including dwelling place, noble titles, and occupations, the inclusion of terms related to kinship may be just another way of narrowing down which Alexander Kennedy (at least six in this sample alone!) they had in front of them. However, these details convey more than just identifying information and shed light on how gender, status, and kinship intersect in the perpetration of violence.

Ewan observed that women acted alone or in mixed-gender groups, and, when in groups, their accomplices were typically family.^[26] This pattern is borne out in the justiciary court records, and the women accused of lethal and near-lethal violence in the justiciary court tend to be the sole offender or part of a mixed group. In fact, none of the entries sampled for this study described a situation in which more than two women acted without the assistance of a male relative.^[27] The most common accomplices in these records were husbands, brothers, children, and in-laws. Sometimes, the group was composed of a single household. In 1527, Mariota Bruce and her daughter, Christina Mallis, were pledged to a future court for the cruel slaughter of Thom Crawford.^[28] The following year, in June 1528, John Carnochane pledged to bring his wife, Mariota Weddale, his son, William Carnochane, and his daughter, Elena Carnochane, to court the following month to answer for their part in the slaughter of Richard Baxter, son of Robert Baxter.^[29] Likewise, in 1536, Katherine Grier, her husband, John Grier, and their daughter, Elizabeth, were pledged to a future court for the cruel slaughter of Fergus Barbour.^[30] In other cases, the assailants involved the extended family and in-laws. In 1530, Elizabeth Haliburton, her husband John Haliburton, and Richard Haliburton, presumably a relation, were accused of the cruel slaughter and mutilation of George Gill.^[31] In the same year, several men and women were convicted of the attempted slaughter of Alexander Lockhart: John Wilson, his brother Andrew Wilson, Agnes Wilson, John’s sister Mariota Wilson, John Anderson in Priestland Milne, his wife Jonet Parker, and John Wilson’s wife Elizabeth Sawyer.^[32]

None of the women in this sample were accused alongside people who were not close relatives, which calls to mind Ewan’s query about whether “the pattern found in other studies, that men had a wider range of acquaintances to draw upon, also held true in Scotland”?^[33] It appears so, and the sample includes several examples of large groups of men composed of dozens of assailants, including fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, cousins, followers, and servants.^[34] It is particularly interesting that in her study of women as pursuers of criminal actions, Dropuljic noticed a similar dynamic: women pursued most for deceased spouses, children, parents, and siblings and less for more distant relationships, whereas “a much wider array of male kin and friends of the deceased are noted in pursuit of homicide actions.”^[35] On both sides of the equation, the family had a clear organizing role in the perpetration of violence and the pursuit of justice.

In addition to kinship networks influencing a woman’s choice of accomplices, the sample suggests that contemporary family dynamics influenced how the courts assigned responsibility. As Ewan and others have argued, combined with the collected or anticipated penalties for noncompearance,^[36] the order in which pannels appeared facilitated the identification of principal pannels and distinguished them from accomplices who played a lesser role.^[37] Several cases in which families were accused together lend support to this interpretation. For the slaughter of Thom Crawford above, the clerks named Mariota before her daughter, Christina. The entry also lists possible noncompearance fines, such as £66 for Mariota and £40 for Christina.^[38] Similarly, for the slaughter of Fergus Barbour above, the potential fines were £66 for Katherine, £40 for her husband, and nothing for their daughter Elizabeth.^[39] Could the higher fines for Mariota and Katherine, combined with their positions as the first pannel in each case, suggest that the court viewed them as more responsible or that they were accused of acting more aggressively than the others?^[40] The precise significance of the name order and fine amounts is unclear but suggests several hypotheses. First, they might indicate that the court considered the mothers to be more culpable than the children. Second, since household heads were often responsible for the morality of family, servants, and guests in their households, higher fines might have been an added penalty for these women failing their duties.^[41] Finally, Ewan suggested that guilt mattered less than compliance with the prescribed punishment (typically a fine).^[42] Therefore, the court might have been concerned about the chances of the mothers compearing and threatened higher penalties to incentivize the sureties to follow through.

It is perhaps not surprising that women in sixteenth-century Scotland relied on their kin to assist them in committing acts of violence, but what about the relationships between women and their victims? Regarding women’s victims, Ewan argued that women mostly assaulted other women, with some attacking men as well.^[43] This was not the case in the justiciary court records, and women acting on their own, with other women, or in mixed groups attacked men (81%) far more often than they did mixed groups (10%) or other women (9%).^[44] Of these (mostly) men, only a few were related to their killers and assailants, and even in these cases, relationships are hard to identify due to the common practice of women retaining their family names upon marriage.^[45] When not stated explicitly, family relationships are sometimes implied by shared surnames, as with Mariota Logat, who was put to the horn for the cruel slaughter of Edward Logat and his daughter Jonet.^[46] Unfortunately, the nature of Mariota’s relationship with Edward and his daughter was not recorded. Given that women did not change their names upon marriage, she was probably not Edward’s wife or Jonet’s stepmother but Edward’s sister, mother, daughter, or more distant relation—there are no other details to help narrow down the relationship. The only other case in which a family relationship between a woman and her victim is implied is that of Jonet Logan, relict (widow) of the late John Watt, who was acquitted, along with Andrew and Robert Steill, of the slaughter of James Watt. The victim might have been a relative of Jonet’s by marriage, but the clerk who wrote up these minutes did not explicitly name her as a relation of anyone but her late husband. The degree to which the cases that made it to court can be considered representative of reality are addressed below, but one explanation for the lack of women charged with attacking family members might be that, as Ewan notes, “if wives attacked husbands, it was generally dealt with privately, away from the eyes of the court.”^[47] While it would be harder to obscure a woman’s involvement in an assault that left a body in its wake, it might be possible that so few women appeared because non-lethal assaults were managed by the family in private.

Indeed, it was more common for women to attack unrelated victims. In this context, there are several examples that reflect patterns observed by Ewan in terms of women attacking their opponents indirectly through household servants.^[48] Given the lack of details in the justiciary court records, it is hard to be certain, but two entries might be examples of such indirect attacks. An entry from 1555 notes that Dame Mariota Montgomery, Lady Semple, came in will^[49] for sanctioning the slaughter, wounding, mutilation, and imprisoning of several men, none of whom appeared to have been titled or landed individuals, committed by her servants in 1553.^[50] The servants compeared at a later court and presented respites, which afforded them (or Semple) time to arrange appropriate compensation for the victims and their kin.^[51] Without more information, it is not clear whether this attack was related to a conflict between another noble family or household; however, even though the woman in question did not participate directly in the attack, that she is charged with ordering it fits with the pattern of using servants as proxies. In a similar example from 1536, the principal pannel, Elizabeth Martin, Lady Fast Castle, was accused art and part alongside several men of the hamesucken, slaughter, and arson committed against the ostensibly untitled and unlanded James, Peter, and William Bisset.^[52] Unlike Lady Semple, who was not implicated in participating in the actual attacks, Lady Fast Castle was charged art and part with the same offences as her accomplices, which leaves room to interpret that she participated directly.^[53] The relationships between Lady Fast Castle, her accomplices, and her victims are not disclosed, but many of her accomplices bore the name Hume, which suggests that they were extended families or tenants of the surrounding area.^[54] The composition of this attack party is reminiscent of other conflicts instigated by border ladies identified by Keith Brown and Robert Pitcairn.^[55] More than these few examples are needed to confirm a pattern of women committing lethal and near-lethal assaults against servants as proxies, but they suggest that this angle is worth pursuing in a more comprehensive survey of the records, particularly in the context of women’s involvement in feud and border conflict.

When women were victims, they most often suffered domestic violence at the hands of their husbands and sons. Although Ewan has noted that domestic violence “is a further, but largely hidden, aspect of interpersonal violence,” this sample contains some entries that might be considered domestic violence. In these cases, the evidence bolsters Ewan’s claims that “women were more often the targets of violence within marriage than the perpetrators.”^[56] In 1493, Thomas Trench in Ormiston presented to the court a letter of remission proving that he had obtained a pardon for the slaughter of his unnamed wife,^[57] and in 1529, John Lyne of Lyne was pledged to a future court for the cruel slaughter of his wife, Margaret Crawford.^[58] Given the brevity of the records, it is not possible to say for certain whether these two cases were the result of a longer pattern of domestic violence or inspired by other motives. However, the entry recording Thomas Trench’s offence reads “for the slaughter of his wife [?] in the same’s womb.”^[59] The missing text (manuscript damage) leaves just enough space for a single word or short phrase such as (et) pueri, which is consistent with the formulaic phrasing in other entries that record the slaughter of “a boy in the womb,” in addition to the slaughter or assault of the pregnant woman.^[60] If so, it suggests that some of the women in these records fell victim to the same fate as those discussed by Sara Butler in her studies of domestic abuse and abortion by assault.^[61]

Domestic abuse was not limited to violence by husbands against wives, and an almost equal number of entries described mothers slain by their sons. In 1525, William Anderson was pledged to a future court for the cruel slaughter of his own mother, Jonet Wilson,^[62] as was Lord John Wardlaw, in 1527, for the cruel slaughter of his mother, Margaret Lindsay, Lady of Torrie.^[63] Neither of these cases contains much information from which to deduce a motive, but one particularly unsettling case from 1549 suggests the implications of remarriage on inheritance as a possible motive for violence against women in this period. Two entries, recorded one after the other, describe how John Leighton of Ulishaven and three accomplices killed Leighton’s pregnant mother, Helen Stirling, and her maid, Jonet Sawlie, who was also pregnant at the time of the slaughter. Moreover, one of the entries notes that the assailants broke into chests belonging to John’s stepfather and stole jewels and other treasures.^[64] As is typical of the records, they are silent on the motives for John’s anger toward his mother. However, in his family history, Clarence Leighton notes that Helen Stirling “had evidently lost little time in marrying” her new husband and proposes that “the son, rightly or wrongly, conceived that she and her second husband had possessed themselves of more than they were entitled to.”^[65] Could it be that John, and perhaps William Anderson and Lord John Wardlaw above, felt insecure about their positions and took lethal action to secure inheritances that they viewed as rightfully theirs? The lack of contextual details in this set of records makes it unwise to speculate at this point, but this seems to be a fruitful direction for future research. Indeed, while the patterns discussed above offer hypotheses about the contexts in which women perpetrated or fell victim to violence, it is hoped that future and more comprehensive analyses of these records, in combination with other sources, will shed further light on them. That said, what is clear from this survey is that bonds of kinship—whole or broken—figured significantly into serious violence committed by and against women.

Status, Violence, and Family Matters

Late medieval and early modern societies, in Scotland and elsewhere in Europe, limited the contexts in which women could engage in violence, especially assaults, killings, and serious property offences, which often read as having a feud-like character. In these societies, violence has both legitimate and illegitimate uses. The distinction between the two can be understood in terms of violence versus violation. According to an individual’s gender, status, and intent, courts and communities might interpret violent attacks as either violence (legitimate) or a violation (illegitimate).^[66] Ewan has noted that assault cases heard in town courts “represent violence which was unacceptable to the community or which the victims believed would be seen as unacceptable.”^[67] Except for the reasonable discipline of children and servants,^[68] most violence committed by women would have been considered disorderly.^[69] Indeed, although not entirely excluded from the culture of honour and shame that fed male cycles of anger and violence typical of the period, women were more limited in their ability to express their feelings physically due to the additional constraints placed on their behaviour by local institutions of social control: the church, the nuclear family, extended families and the neighbourhood.^[70] Furthermore, violence that “involved a reversal of the accepted social hierarchy” was particularly reprehensible.^[71] Yet women, especially those who held politically important positions or who found themselves serving as their husbands’ deputies during long absences, sometimes had the occasion to involve themselves in conflicts that looked rather like small local wars.^[72] This is evident in the justiciary court records.

Women are not absent from sources that record feuding and interpersonal violence, although they have been sidelined—historically and historiographically.^[73] Furthermore, when women take centre stage in most scholarship on feuding and kinship, their roles tend to be limited to the victims of vengeful abduction plots or as brides who brought peace and a new era of friendship to feuding kindreds through an arranged marriage.^[74] In terms of women as perpetrators of serious violence or active participants in feud, let alone in the context of how familial bonds influenced how and with whom they engaged in violent behaviour, there are some serious gaps in our knowledge. Thus, the following discussion considers how women’s connections to prominent border families expanded the contexts in which some could choose violence as a legitimate means of resolving conflict or defending family honour. Moreover, it proposes that status mitigated the ways in which gender typically constrained the use of violence during this period.

As Ewan has shown, context and status affected “how the community and women themselves perceived their use of physical assault” and that “some could justify violence as an acceptable method of discipline.”^[75] Many of the women in these records claimed kinship with leading families in the Borders and elsewhere in Scotland. These local magnates often cooperated with and supported the crown’s efforts to maintain a sense of peace and order throughout the realm, although individual personalities, interests, and methods sometimes led to conflict and violent attempts at resolution.^[76] Some of these clashes hardly resemble efforts to resolve disagreements, but the perpetration of arson and robbery alongside homicide and physical assaults was typical of the genre of violence used to resolve conflicts and prevent further escalations, including feud, pressuring legal opponents to settle, and coercing uncooperative landholders.^[77] Few women accused and convicted in the justiciary court engaged in warlike and hugely disruptive offences, but some noblewomen committed homicides and serious assaults alongside a range of other criminal and treasonous offences.^[78] In these instances, an apparent lack of punishment suggests that status could overcome gender to lend legitimacy to some kinds of violence when committed by women, even for lethal and near-lethal assaults.

When noblewomen committed violence associated with feuding or local warfare, it was perhaps unusual but well within the bounds of acceptable behaviour for women of their station acting in a man’s stead. As Ewan argued, “by illustrating women’s willingness to fight and the nature of their assaults,” cases that record violence “suggest some ways in which Scottish townswomen perceived both themselves and their roles” in their communities.^[79] As with Lady Fast Castle and Lady Semple above, the justiciary court records contain evidence of several ladies who readily commanded or participated in feud-like conflicts typically attributed to male landholders in the Borders and elsewhere. Some were invested with their own authority, while others obtained their status from their husbands or by association with distant and influential kin. Some women, such as Margaret Hume, prioress of North Berwick, were directly responsible for maintaining and defending ecclesiastical lands, and her 1549 attack on Alexander Oliphant of Kelly and his lands suggests a territorial dispute. On the same day, Oliphant was fined as surety when six men failed to compear for invading Hume’s lands in Grange, lying in wait and attacking the prioress and her servants for their slauchter, trapping them within the mansion house there. The pannels were pledged to appear at a future court and, the next year, Oliphant himself was named a pannel, along with nineteen others, for forethocht felony, oppression, and hamesucken committed against the prioress—all were pledged to a future court.^[80] While the details of any conflicts leading up to these events are not preserved in this set of records, the presence of women in these records suggests that Scottish women of a certain status perceived themselves as having access to uses of violence typically reserved for men.

In other cases, the origins of the conflict and the status of the individuals are somewhat obscured, but other parties, such as sureties, hint at membership in powerful kin groups. In July 1558, Barbara Hume, wife of Alexander Lauder of “Unnaquhye,” with twenty-one others, was pledged to a future ayre in Forfar for art and part of the cruel slaughter of William Guthrie. Robert Semple, son of Lord John Semple, pledged to arrange the compearance of all pannels. Six months later, Hume appeared again for the same offences, with fourteen accomplices from the original entry. They were repledged to the Kirriemuir regality court, with the sureties in this entry recorded as James Stewart of Traquhair and Alexander Lauder of Halton, presumably a relation of Humes’ husband.^[81] She appears to have benefited from numerous connections, including those with the Semples and with her husband’s extended family. Within the justiciary court records, there is no evidence that these women were convicted or faced punishment of any kind. Is it possible that it was acceptable for them to instigate and participate in some degree of violence based on their positions within or connections to prominent landholding families and the church? In this period, it was primarily men who bore the social responsibility to right wrongs or pursue justice, but women also involved themselves in these dynamics.^[82] It is difficult to know the specific motives and contexts that led these women to become involved in violent attacks, but the apathy with which the justiciary court pursued noblewomen suggests that they were not aberrations in need of swift and immediate punishment.

It is worth noting that these are just some of the cases that made it to court and, furthermore, most criminal prosecutions were pursued privately and often settled through assythment or by purchasing remissions.^[83] Thus, broader social and cultural ideas about gender roles, shame, and honour deserve brief consideration. Based on Garthine Walker’s study of English courts,^[84] Ewan posited that victims might have been reluctant to report and sue for attacks committed by women unless it was clear that they were overwhelmed by several women or a mixed group of assailants.^[85] Could it be that pursuers were less inclined to accuse women of violent offences or that they were reluctant to press the issue of noblewomen committing violence? That the women discussed above made it into the criminal record suggests that they pushed the acceptable limits of legitimate violence, but that these same cases tended to disappear from the records suggests that being hauled to court was all the pressure needed to remind them of their place or press a settlement. Since it is always a question whether the surviving records accurately depict the offences, we might also ask whether assumptions about responsibility caused pursuers to name men in their suits in addition to or more readily than women, which might help explain the ratio of men to women in these records. With violence and legal proceedings serving similar roles in conflict resolution processes, the assumption that men had “a sense of duty to care for and sustain those within their familial structure” might have influenced men to initiate acts of violence related to family honour and to accompany women assailants as a means of protecting or watching over them.^[86] Further research will hopefully clarify these issues, but the evidentiary record to date suggests that the women named in these sources, whether victims or perpetrators, fit with patterns observed in other sets of court records, and nearly all instigated or became entangled in violent conflicts defined by relationships within and between kin groups.

Conclusion

Women could certainly commit violent offences on their own, but it was far more common for them to act as part of groups composed of family members. This chapter has made this argument based on a sample of cases preserved in just one set of court records, but it has shown that approaching legal and administrative sources with an eye to the role of family in the generation, incidence, and aftermath of violent conflict is a productive exercise. The women in the justiciary court records are not necessarily unique, but their offences—lethal and near-lethal violence that occasionally reads as feud-like—offer a kind of litmus test to further refine the line between illegitimate and legitimate uses of violence for women in this period. Regarding the justiciary court more broadly, this chapter contributes to scholarship on this institution by bridging the gap between Jackson Armstrong’s earlier study, which does not apply gender analysis, and Wasser’s unpublished dissertation, which covers the early seventeenth century. While Amy Blakeway’s study of the records covers the entire sixteenth century, it focuses primarily on the development and operation of the court in relation to governmental shifts during regencies.

As is often the case, the observations made here raise as many or more questions than answers. Some cases disappeared without comment, but others were repledged to local jurisdictions. Multi-jurisdictional studies are needed to follow repledged pannels. In addition to tracing some cases to their conclusions, this approach might reveal conflicts played out in local courts that provide additional context for the central court cases. There are also some limitations to the conclusions arrived at via sampling. A more comprehensive survey of the justiciary court records might clarify the significance of pannel order and potential fines for noncompearance. Likewise, more data might offer explanations for the discrepancies between the patterns observed in the justiciary court and local courts, such as women assaulting or killing mostly men in the former and women assaulting mostly other women in the latter. The findings presented here also have broader historiographical implications. First, studies of feud ought to consider the possibility that women played active roles in feuding culture. Specifically, did the pattern of women attacking opponents through servants as proxies extend to feuding contexts? Second, this study serves as a reminder to treat edited materials, such as Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials, with caution. Antiquarian editorial practices have obscured important statistical data and tend to frame women’s violence as highly exceptional. For this reason, manuscript records, even those as difficult to use as the justiciary court books, are preferred.

The arguments made here build on Ewan’s committed efforts to uncover historical women and the many ways in which they and their families interact with courts and communities in Scotland. Indeed, the entire doctoral dissertation upon which this chapter is based would not exist were it not for her support, encouragement, and insistence that the author was uniquely qualified to take on this understudied and oft-avoided set of manuscripts. It is hoped that this attempt to expand the research available on women, family, and violence in premodern Scotland at once embodies Ewan’s dedicated spirit and offers directions for future work that continues to advance the position of women and gender in Scottish history.