This collection of essays may be viewed to some extent as a companion volume to the same author’s The Emergence of Privateering, published by Brill in 2023, since the writing of both books arose from his editing of Alexander King’s Treatise on Maritime Law, published by the Stair Society in 2018. The writer of that sixteenth-century treatise devoted two chapters to discussion of the law governing the raiding of enemy shipping in wartime and the taking of reprisals in peacetime, and he planned to write a further chapter on illegal seizures by pirates, all topics dealt with in the 2023 book. King devoted several other chapters to discussion of the law governing maritime commerce in Scotland, examining topics dealt with in this book. However, whereas the 2023 book was designed to address a single question – how did privateering emerge as a new category of maritime raiding, distinct from the three categories that interested King? – and looked beyond sixteenth-century Scotland, this collection is designed to explore various aspects of the commercial law applied to shipping in that period and place, with different essays addressing different questions. Apart from the final essay, which attempts to draw conclusions from the preceding ten, each essay ought to make sense if read in isolation from the others. Nevertheless, the collection as a whole does have a unifying concern. If the contrast between the wartime raiding discussed by King and the wartime raiding later known as privateering demanded an explanation, there is also a significant difference between the commercial law discussed by King and the commercial law applied in the courts of the coastal towns of Scotland, which again demands an explanation. After an introductory essay concerned with discovering which courts tended to handle disputes over maritime trade, the first part of the collection contains essays on the law applied in the courts of the coastal towns, although the third essay in that part also considers the law applied in other courts. The second part of the collection contains essays on the writing of treatises by King and two of his contemporaries, and the third part contains essays on the relationship between the law of the towns and the law in the treatises. The conclusions drawn in the final essay are also concerned with this relationship, primarily between local customs and the ius commune taught in the European universities, although other types of common law are also considered.

Versions of four of the essays included in this collection have been published before. The second appeared in J.W. Armstrong and E.B.I. Frankot (eds), Cultures of Law in Urban Northern Europe: Scotland and Its Neighbours, c. 1350-c. 1650 (London, 2021), the sixth in the Journal of Legal History in 2013, the ninth in P. Hellwege and G. Rossi (eds), Maritime Risk Management: Essays on the History of Marine Insurance, General Average and Sea Loan (Berlin, 2021), and the tenth in A.R.C. Simpson and J.Ø. Sunde (eds), Comparative Perspectives in Scottish and Norwegian Legal History, Trade and Seafaring, 1200–1800 (Edinburgh, 2023). Most were written in response to invitations to speak on specific topics at conferences, and the author is grateful both for those invitations and for permission to reprint the essays here, as well as for comments made by other participants in the conferences and by publishers’ readers. Although the sixth essay was not written for a conference, instructive comments were again made when the topic was discussed at a meeting of the Scottish Legal History Group in 2013. Other essays owe something to papers presented at a ‘Workshop on Practicks’ in Aberdeen (the fifth) and at the British Legal History Conference in St Andrews (the fourth and seventh), and on these occasions too helpful comments were made. A few suggestions made in the final essay received an even more tentative airing at a conference held in Edinburgh shortly before the arrival of covid-19. The essays previously published appear in a form closer to the versions originally written, and take more account of primary sources, but no attempt has been made to take further account of secondary sources published since their first appearance. Given the origins of most essays in a pièce d’occasion, there is inevitably a certain amount of repetition in the collection as a whole, as well as some revision of earlier thought, though not (it is believed) contradiction.

Especially when the restrictions imposed in response to the arrival of covid-19 started to be relaxed, great assistance was received from archivists and librarians, some of whom had gone to some trouble to make sources available even while the restrictions were in place, and many of whom had already been very helpful before the restrictions were imposed. Further assistance has been received from Alessandra Giliberto, who as well as providing invaluable advice also arranged for a draft of the book to be read by anonymous experts, who suggested several improvements. The production process has been surprisingly painless for the author, thanks to the efforts of Petra Stiglmayer and David Aberra. It goes without saying that the author is deeply grateful to all these people for the help they have provided.