1. The Privy Council Project

In 2020 the universities of Stirling and Dundee in Scotland were the recipients of a collaborative Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant to study the Scottish Privy Council in the period 1689 to 1708. The project, the Scottish Privy Council Project [SPCP] was aimed at exploring the records of this period with a view to creating a wide range of published outputs in social, economic, and political spheres and also transcribing and displaying in an online platform the main records of the Council for use by historians and the general public in an important initiative in digital humanities. The outcome is this website which has been created and edited by the SPCP team.

In some ways the Scottish Privy Council is a unique body given its place in the pre-modern history of Scotland and how it contrasts with many similar institutions across the Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These factors, as well as matters of serendipity, explain why such a significant research grant was awarded to the project, after many years of discussion and planning, and why efforts were made to assemble a strong team of researchers and experts in institutional and governmental history. Therefore, Dr Alastair Mann (principal investigator, University of Stirling), Dr Alan MacDonald (co-investigator, University of Dundee) and Dr Allan Kennedy (project manager, Dundee), were joined by research fellows Dr Laura Doak (Dundee) and Dr Clare Loughlin (Stirling) and PhD students Robbie Tree (Stirling) and Susanne Weston (Dundee). All were and remain involved in intensive research into the history of the council, as well as playing key roles in delivering the digital humanities aspects of the SPCP. The SPCP gratefully acknowledges the support of the Leverhulme Trust in creating this resource. Leverhulme’s award recognised the project’s potential to fulfil its funding criteria of originality, uniqueness, innovation and opportunity for ‘new’ researchers and ‘new’ research: collectively we feel we are achieving that potential.

 2. Background and Register of the Privy Council of Scotland

Any student or scholar who has had occasion to research early modern Scottish History will certainly be familiar with the Register of the Privy Council of Scotland. Starting in 1880, the core Privy Council records were edited and published in a series of printed volumes – nearly 50 in total – covering the period 1545 to 1691.  Given the importance of the Privy Council in early modern Scotland, these volumes quickly became central to Scottish historical scholarship, sustaining countless books, articles, and doctoral theses with the breadth and richness of material they contained.

However, the withdrawal of public funding in the 1970s meant that the project could not be carried to completion, and the final tranche of Privy Council records, covering the years up to the Council’s abolition in 1708, has always remained unpublished. Yet preliminary work on these later records had been undertaken, resulting in a still surviving collection of typewritten transcriptions and summaries which had been intended to form the basis of further volumes. The basic premise of the Scottish Privy Council Project was to resume this work, and to finish the task of making an edited version of the Privy Council records for the period 1692-1708 available for public use.

3. Nature of the manuscript record

For the period in question, the records of the Privy Council survive in two main streams, all held in the National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh (NRS). The first, and most important, is the formal registers – the ‘official’ proceedings written up by contemporary clerks as the authoritative record of conciliar business and decisions. The registers, in turn, fall into two categories: the ‘Acta’, relating to public business, and the ‘Decreta’, relating to private business. The distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ as it pertains to the Council’s activities is not completely consistent, but generally ‘public’ business involved things like proclamations, policy and regulatory orders, tax and military levies, and commissions to hold public office, while ‘private’ business incorporated judicial and arbitrational decisions, and the awarding of individual favours like patents, licences, or pensions. The Acta and Decreta registers are very extensive; for the period 1692-1708, they cover eleven large, hard-bound ledgers (the Decreta books being somewhat smaller) and a small portion of a twelfth. Each ledger contains around 800 pages in the case of the Acta (six-and-a-bit volumes), and around 400 pages for the Decreta (five volumes).

The formal registers are supplemented by a large collection of miscellaneous papers, also in the National Records of Scotland (NRS, PC12). Arranged across ten separate boxes, these papers consist of various loose documents accumulated in the course of day-to-day conciliar business, and which formed the raw materials from which the registers were formulated. Many different kinds of material (both printed and manuscript) are incorporated within this collection: loose petitions, draft acts, copies of letters, legal documentation, procedural notes, minutes, bonds of caution (promises of good behaviour), and much more besides.

An example of miscellaneous privy council material held by the National Records of Scotland (NRS, PC12), in this case a document for the eyes of Gilbert Elliot, clerk to the Privy Council. Courtesy of the National Records of Scotland.

Some of these papers are reproduced in the registers; others are merely summarised or cited. Still others are not mentioned at all, instead remaining as part of the vast sea of ‘invisible’ paperwork evidently necessary to keep the Council functioning. The miscellaneous papers, then, are not part of the ‘official’ Privy Council record, but they provide us with an infinitely richer insight into how conciliar government actually worked.

Moving beyond the Privy Council’s own archive, documents related to the Privy Council can be found scattered across an enormous range of other collections – virtually all local government, judicial, and ecclesiastical records from this period are likely to preserve at least some references to the Council’s business, and the probability is equally high that most collections of personal and estate papers will contain copies of, or allusions to, one or more conciliar papers. These traces are generally too sprawling for recording them to be viable, but in some cases, references to conciliar business in non-conciliar collections are more concentrated. Three examples are worth noting. Firstly, the Leslie Papers (NRS, GD26) preserve a clutch of warrants related to treason processes in 1707. Secondly, the Mar and Kellie Papers (NRS, GD126) contain a run of Council journals dating from 1705 to 1707. And thirdly, the Seafield Papers (NRS, GD248) house a small collection of letters, petitions, minutes, and other materials, mainly dating to the early eighteenth century. As with the miscellaneous boxes, these outside collections can help to supplement the relatively sanitised view of conciliar activities we get from the formal registers.

Alongside these various manuscript sources, the project team was fortunate to have at its disposal the typewritten transcriptions and summaries generated as part of the original Register of the Privy Council of Scotland project. These consist of many hundreds of paper sheets containing a mixture of edited transcriptions and abbreviated summaries – generally (although not entirely consistently), the original team had elected to transcribe the Acta and summarise the Decreta.

 4. Scoping the project

Given the disparate nature of the surviving records, the first order of business for the research team was to decide on the overall scope of the project. We started from the principle that we wanted to make as much of the record available as possible, and that we wanted to do so verbatim – that is, we hoped to reproduce the text in its entirety, and as faithfully as practicable. From this determination flowed a number of inevitable conclusions. Firstly, we could not proceed purely from the typescripts prepared for the old Register of the Privy Council project, since these mixed transcription with summary, and had also worked to a somewhat opaque editorial standard (for example, ‘correcting’ or modernising language fairly inconsistently).

 

Secondly, aiming at full transcription limited the volume of record we could realistically hope to process with the time and funding available to us. As a result, the decision was taken not to transcribe any of the miscellaneous papers, or any materials residing in private collections. These would merely be calendared, and our primary attention was instead limited to the ‘official’ record preserved in the registers. While this decision was a result of practical constraints, it also reflected sound theoretical principles – it would render the finished resource more coherent and user-friendly, and would also accord with the broad approach previously taken by the editors of The Register of the Privy Council, which had also focused on the Acta and Decreta (except where these were missing). By focusing on the formal registers, therefore, we would make it easier for users to approach the new resource as a continuation of the existing one.

5. Creating a new record

Once the initial parameters of the project had been established, the core work of creating a new record could begin. This was a multi-stage process, and it began with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanning of the existing typewritten transcriptions to produce large, editable Word files. The original plan had been for the project team to then compare these files to the original manuscript record, checking for accuracy, correcting errors, and expanding summaries in order to produce a full transcription. However, the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic early in 2020 made this impossible, since the manuscripts are held in the National Records of Scotland, and this facility was closed during lockdown; prolonged consultation of the manuscripts in situ was therefore out of the question.

Instead, in the days before lockdown, the team worked to acquire digital images of the registers, resulting in a collection of many thousands of photographs. Working now from these pictures, rather than from the physical registers, the team used a combination of comparison with the OCR scans and fresh transcription work to produce a ‘master’ transcription of each register. These transcriptions reproduced the Acta and Decreta record exactly as presented in the registers; that is, individual headed entries, one for each item of business, arranged chronologically on a day-by-day basis. Every effort was made to transcribe the record as it appears in the manuscript registers. For example, in date headings and elsewhere, years have been transcribed in the form ‘Jaj vic and ninety two years’ (1692). While the first three characters represent a corruption of what was originally ‘Jm’ (i.e. 1×1,000), in the original record, it was unambiguously written as ‘Jaj’ by contemporary scribes. The end result was a series of Word files and about three million words in total.

The next stage involved revisiting these fresh transcriptions in a process termed by the project team as the ‘second pass’. Aside from rearranging the records into year-based Word files (as opposed to the volume-based organisational system used hitherto), this involved three main objectives. Firstly, each transcription was ‘tidied up’, both by correcting errors in the transcription itself and by ensuring it complied with a framework of previously agreed editorial standards. This process also involved inserting explanatory notes as deemed necessary to help readers understand the text. Secondly, each entry in the registers was allocated a unique identification and reference number, marking it out as a distinct, self-contained record. These reference numbers consisted of the letter ‘A’ (for Acta) or ‘D’ (for Decreta), followed by the year and month of production, and finally by a sequential entry number. Thus, the reference number ‘A1694/5/10′ was allocated to the tenth entry recorded in the Acta register for May 1694.

Thirdly, a hierarchical classification system was devised for each record to aid understanding and access. Central to this was locating each record within a fairly small, predetermined framework of record-type classifications – ‘sederunts’, for example, or ‘orders’, ‘warrants’, or ‘proclamations’ (among others). This classification system was designed to be fairly unobtrusive, and its aim was simply to give readers a general sense of the type of business each individual record was discharging.

Once these ‘second pass’ texts had been produced, the final stage of the editorial process was a final ‘global’ check. This involved a high-level survey of each year-based file with the aim of ensuring consistency, particularly in the formatting of classification hierarchies and editorial notations. Upon the completion of this check, the project was left with a fully edited transcription of the entire Acta and Decreta register, ready to be uploaded to the SPCR website.

6. Translation

While most of the Privy Council’s registers were written in something very close to the English of the period, they present some linguistic difficulties, especially around the use of specifically Scots terms, chaotic punctuation, and a wholly unstandardised approach to orthography. All this could be potentially challenging for readers in and of itself, but it also makes digital searching more difficult; even the most sophisticated ‘fuzzy’ search would likely fail to pick up on the myriad different forms an individual word might take, particularly if it happens to be a place- or personal name. For this reason, SPCR includes a parallel ‘translation’ next to each record, wherein the early modern text is rendered in standardised modern English. This helps maximise comprehensibility, but also, and perhaps more importantly, provides a consistent and reliable source for the search engine. The translation, in short, effectively provides SPCR with a de facto (and highly detailed) index.

If, for the most part, the translation text is essentially an exercise in modernisation, some parts of the record did require full-scale translation. This is because a small number of records – mainly those recording patents and certain forms of commission – were originally written in Latin. The project team therefore undertook to provide full translations of these records into modern English, and we are grateful to Dr Eila Williamson for undertaking this work for us.

‘7. ‘Completing’ the Record

By the website launch in 2024 only a small amount of the translation process will have been completed. This arises from the amount of time required to complete the editing of a translation text of three million words. Nevertheless, over the coming months and years the editors will add more and more translated text with the additional search possibilities that that enables. In the meantime, users will be able to search through the manuscript record and should note the detailed description of how this can be done in the Help page. Looking to the future, this resource has been designed to allow further records to be added as they are discovered with, for example, a flexible referencing system that could accommodate minutes and other relevant materials. It is our hope that this website and its records are a foundation for research into government and policy in a dramatic period of flux and transition in the economic, political and social life of the people of Scotland.