Poser 296 - Minutes of Elgin kirk session, 1622
This poser comes from the minutes of Elgin kirk session in 1622 (National Records of Scotland, CH2/145/3/1 page 195).
If you think that kirk session cases always featured offences like fornication and irregular marriage, you'd be wrong. Kirk sessions often attempted to take the heat out of what today we would term anti-social behaviour. This was especially common in the burghs, where people lived in close proximity to each other and noisy, badly-behaved residents could make life a misery for their neighbours.
In the case below, a formal accusation (bill of sklander) was made against the women of two households, and they had to find surety (caution) that they would not offend in certain ways.
Look out for the letter yogh in fourth word of line one (Baillzie); the use of letter w where we would expect u, for example the last word in this extract (wtheris); and what we call o-barnacles in closely written letters (Douglas - line 1).
Question: who were the individuals reported to the session and what had they to agree not to do?
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