Public Seminar Series. Prosecuting Serious Crime in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland by Allan Kennedy
Scholars have long recognised that studying the history of crime and criminal justice can offer unique insights into the ordering structures and assumptions of past societies, as well as helping us grapple with more diffuse issues of cultural mores and shared mentalities.
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Yet research into Scottish criminal history remains embryonic, especially for the pre-modern period. Drawing on the research for my most recent monograph, which sought to begin the work of plugging that gap, this paper explores the handling of serious criminality within the Scottish judicial system during the second half of the seventeenth century. It begins by outlining the position of the central criminal court, the Justiciary Court (later known as the High Court of Justiciary), within Scotland’s complex ecosystem of criminal jurisdictions.
From that basis, it undertakes a survey of the Justiciary Court’s business, teasing out key patterns as regards both offences and offenders. It then explores sentencing, reflecting in particular on how far day-to-day practice accorded with the notoriously harsh suite of penalties technically provided for in the criminal code. Such analysis, the paper suggests, allows us to reconstruct the Justiciary Court as a flexible, rapidly-evolving forum for the prosecution of serious criminality. In turn, we can use the court to shed light on Scotland as a whole, deriving from it telling insights into the way Scotland was governed, and how Scottish society functioned, in the decades immediately preceding the Union.
Bio
Allan Kennedy is Lecturer in Scottish History at the University of Dundee. His research focuses on the political and social history of the early modern period, and he has particular interests in deviance, marginality, the Highlands, and the Privy Council. Key publications include Governing Gaeldom: The Scottish Highlands and the Restoration State (2014), Life at the Margins in Early Modern Scotland (2024), Serious Crime in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (2025), and Early Modern Scotland: Themes in Focus (2026). He is also co-editor of the online database Scottish Privy Council Records, spcr.ac.uk.
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