A Guide to the Procedure of the Admiralty Court

Three manuscript copies are known to have survived of a manual on the
procedure followed in the admiralty courts of Scotland during the early modern
period. This article begins by describing the three manuscripts and the manual
they contain. It then seeks to identify the author of the manual, arguing from
internal and external evidence that he was almost certainly not the lawyer to
whom the manual has often been attributed but another prominent advocate and
judge. Finally, an attempt is made to discover when the manual was written. It is
found that the version of the manual copied in two of the manuscripts seems to
have been revised around twenty years after it was originally written. Concluding
comments are made about the use historians may wish to make of the manual, of
which an edition is being prepared for publication.