The Paisley Abbey Rental
The Paisley Abbey Rental, printed by Cameron Lees, is one of our most important sources for the history of Renfrewshire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is printed between pages lvi & clxxvii as an appendix to his book. (For those who cannot easily access the book by Cameron Lees both The Paisley Register and the Abbey Rental are available as microfiche copies within ‘The Monastery & Abbey of Paisley, John Malden (ed.)’). The original document is also available from the National Library of Scotland (NLS) as a .pdf which you can download. See:
(The pages in Cameron Lees’ transcript do not quite match the pages of the original rent book. Cameron Lees gives his page numbers in Roman numerals – but please note that the numbers given for clxvi and clxxvi are incorrect as they stand. The original document has been extensively repaired and, at some stage, Arabic numerals have been added to the top of each page in the middle. [I have ignored other page numbers in Arabic which sometimes appear in the top right-hand corner]. Unfortunately, these Arabic numbers are not found on every page, and there are also some blank pages, all of which add an extra challenge to the business of comparing old and new. There are other numbering quirks but in general I have been able to use a match code such as ‘p lxvi orig. p 12’ which simply means that an item will be found on page lxvi of the Appendix in Cameron Lees and page 12 of the original manuscript – as viewed in the NLS .pdf. [A very small amount of information which lies too close to the gutter has been lost in the NLS scan]).
After studying the original we can only feel a sense of gratitude and admiration for the task which Cameron Lees undertook. The Rental runs from 1460 until the 1550s and includes a wealth of information about the Abbey’s property portfolio. It is called a rental but, as others have pointed out, it could as well be called a book of leases since it records the leases by which the Abbey set its lands to tenants. We have the names of the properties, the names of their tenants, and sometimes their wives. We learn what forms of rent they paid – whether in silver, grain, cheese, stirks, poultry or geese. We discover what services they had to undertake; what gifts were asked of them; how many days they had to labour in the Abbot’s fields; what tasks were expected of them; what carriages (freight journeys) they had to go on, whether summer or winter, short or long. We learn of the Abbey’s rules for their tenants, of the occasions when the Abbot’s permission was required for any change in tenancy arrangements, permission to marry, the duty of care to support aged parents etc, The abbey also owned properties in the town of Paisley, fishings, and churchlands in other parishes with which it had been endowed in previous centuries.
The Abbey’s lands lay in a number of different lordships auch as Paisley, Glen, Kyle and Kilpatrick. In the Rental, properties are usually arranged under their respective lordships. For this study I have excluded the lordships of Kyle (Ayrshire) and Kilpatrick (Dumbartonshire). (Evidence for the latter can be found under the Lennox parishes in another section of this blog). I have also excluded data which belongs to properties in other counties such as Argyll, Lanark and Roxburgh.
With a rental-book which extends over nearly a century it is only to be expected that we find a great variety of entries. These are in multiple hands, of greater and lesser clarity. Given that so many entries were repetitive there is a good deal of abbreviation – some of which, particularly if ill-written, can be difficult to decipher. In some entries the ink is faded and of a lighter colour. In others the quill has been freshly dipped and the line is black and clear. On one occasion the ink has spilled and a large ink blodge obscures some of the text.
How were the leases recorded? There is a rough outline chronology to the Rental in that the first entries were made in 1460 and the last formal rental (never completed) indicates it was started in 1550. There were attempts to initiate new rentals at dated intervals such as 1460, 1464, 1465, 1472, 1484, 1502, 1505, 1521, 1522, 1525 and 1550. Sometimes these only applied to particular lordships and sometimes even these are not in strict sequence. A rental for Kill (Kyle) in 1505 is on page ci and precedes (in the written text) that for Paisley in 1484 on page ciii.
We can reconstruct a likely process. In 1525 (p cxli orig. p 137) there is a beautifully written heading in the rental. The scribe (prior Alexander Walcar), then wrote out a list of the abbey’s properties on this and subsequent pages – leaving a space between each for what he anticipated would be the entries made in the years following. (Previous rentals had included terms of 3 years, 5 years, ‘during the Abbot’s will’ and ‘from year to year’). As the years unfolded these spaces would be filled out with new information when tenants died and were replaced. Often this new information would be written by a different hand, according to whichever monk had been tasked with maintaining the record. What also happened was that previous records, now no longer relevant, would be scored through. Sometimes there was insufficient space for the new information so the lines got tighter and tighter and, when that didn’t suffice, the data would be squeezed into the left-hand margin, otherwise blank for sub-headings. The net result, of course, could be a mass of scribbled comments, additions, erasures and insertions, written and over-written; and our admiration for Cameron Lees only increases as we wonder how he made sense of it all.
With the passage of time some pages became very worn and there is a little loss. There are also places where I am amazed that Cameron Lees managed to decipher anything at all, but of course the manuscript may have been in better condition when he first transcribed it prior to 1878.
Although we have the dates for each rental it is by no means certain when each entry was made. The printed text found in Cameron Lees disguises all the nuances of the original document. We do not see the changes in handwriting or colour of ink. We cannot always tell where a marginal sub-heading may be muddled with the text. For these reasons I have preceded most dates with c. (circa about/around). It is only really with the first entries (1460), the last (1550), and those immediately following a rental date, that we can be more certain.
Many amendments and insertions were themselves dated but these usually apply to a few lines of text at most. In many cases the added dates are of the type ‘in anno xxiiiio’ (i.e. in the year ‘24’ meaning ‘1524’). In later years these are increasingly replaced by dates in Arabic numerals such as ‘anno 1551’.
There are a few occasions where I differ from Cameron Lees. I have not checked more than the tiniest fraction of entries against the original. But, on reading the transcript certain queries arise and I have endeavoured to check these. There are a couple of occasions when something has been missed – and I have just added these to the table and noted the discrepancy. There are some very rare occasions when an error has crept in – quite possibly between the process of transcription and its appearance on the printed page. Again I have noted these if they appear in the tables. Finally there are a few occasions when I have also struggled with the original and ended up thinking that Cameron Lees may be wrong but I wouldn’t want to put money on it. An example would be the reading of the word ‘geese’ or, more properly ‘of geese’.
One of the most common words in the rental is avenarum (i.e. ‘of oats’, plural). (Cameron Lees usually spelled this auenarum but I have always changed this to avenarum). So, an entry might read ‘iiii celdras avenarum’ (p lxiii, Lyncleyff), ‘ix c. avenarum’ (p cxxx, Arkylston), ‘xxx b. avenarum’ (p cxli, part of The Ynch) referring to 4 chalders, 9 chalders and 30 bolls respectively – which were measures of grain. Moreover the ending ‘-rum’ was often abbreviated to save time and space. (You can see umpteen examples in the original manuscript). A problem arises when you get similar words such as ‘avenarum’ (‘of oats’) and ‘anserum’ or ‘aucarum’ (both meaning ‘of geese’) which, if inelegantly written and with abbreviation, can look remarkably alike.
There are three specific examples to draw attention to:
The lease for ‘The Granys’ (The Grange) on page cl c. 1525 states ‘xvxx petre casei v dd avenarum’. What this means is (15 (xv) multiplied by 20 (xx) =) 300 stones of cheese and 5 (dd=duodenas) dozen oats. If we check page 149 of the original manuscript the relevant word is faint, abbreviated and hard to read but I think it actually says ‘aucarum’ (of geese). (In other words the render included 60 geese). The following lines give different entries made in 1528, 1531, 1544 and 1551. In each case the tenant gave 60 stones cheese and 12 ‘aucis’ (geese). In 1460 Grange appears to have been divided into 5 parts and that seems to hold good c. 1525 and subsequently. This is the first year they did not give stirks or stirk silver so we can infer some changes in local farming practice.
We also have a reference from Auchans in 1519 (p cxxii orig. p 94) where John Atkyn and John Knok paid ‘1 dusan ansarum’ (1 dozen geese) on Saint Mirren’s Day. The reading is uncertain but again I prefer ‘aucarum’.
Finally we have a reference from Knasland c. 1522 (p cxxxiii orig. p 122) where the property is the hands of John Bully’s widow ‘pro custodia avenarum’ which – taken literally would mean ‘for watching the oats’. The writing is extremely scrappy but again I think it reads ‘aucarum’. This also makes a lot more sense. Oats, when stored, would need someone to watch the grain store for damp, rats etc. But watching the geese seems a much more likely occupation for a, perhaps elderly, widow. (The geese presumably had their wings clipped). In fact, on p cxlviii c. 1525 Knaflandis (as it is here spelled) was given to Catrine (Catherine) Watson for life ‘quia pauperam’ (i.e. ‘on account of her poverty’). It was a small property, a 5 shilling-land, but perhaps eminently suited, with its corresponding light duties of goose-watch, to an elderly lady who had fallen on hard times.
Why does any of this matter? Well, it might help to link Knasland with Gooshous which is a settlement located by Pont, Gordon and Blaeu just NW of Paisley Abbey. Gooshous is probably the same as the settlement which is marked Fowlhouse in Ainslie’s maps of 1796 & 1800. The references in the rental are from the first half of the sixteenth century and Pont’s map surveying was completed before the end of the same century. It seems pretty assured that geese were a small but important part of the monastic economy. This should not surprise us – geese were also rendered as part of the rent in Islay, where they, along with their brethren in Uist, continue to pose problems to this day.
Unfortunately we do not know what type of geese the monks consumed. It would be doubly interesting to know if they were barnacle geese. The reason for this is that there was a long-standing mediaeval tradition concerning barnacle geese to the effect that they were generated from sea-shells rather than eggs. The reason this mattered was because if such geese could be proven to come from the sea then they could be eaten during Lent. Unfortunately we lack knowledge of Paisley’s geese and any dietary myths which prevailed during that period. (For more information on this tradition see ‘The Hebridean Traveller, Birlinn, 2004 pp 252-256).
I think Knasland and Gooshous were small neighbouring locations, perhaps originally one location which subdivided. Both properties shared an association with geese. (See Paisley Table for detailed analysis).
RMS IV (2077) 1572, on an original of 1554, refers to 5s Knaifisland. There was a customary obligation to watch the monastery’s geese. We know it was a small property because AHC Volume 2 No 172 31 January 1572-3 refers to ‘fyve akeris of land or thairby callit Knaiffis land’. It is Knaifislandis ‘extending to 6 acres or thereabouts’ in RMS VIII (1865) 1631, on original of 1625.
AHC Volume 2 No 172 31 January 1572-3 refers to a charter to John Gilchrist of, amongst other lands,: ‘four akeris of land or thairby callit Guis houslandis’.
RMS V (1320) 1587 gives both Guishousland and Knaifisland.
RMS XI (279) 1662 gives both Gooshousland and Knavsland.
Leave a Reply