The Financial Accounts of Provost Andrew Alanson of Aberdeen for the year 1470–1, held in the Beinecke Library, Yale

The financial records of medieval Scottish urban government do not survive in any great quantity and the accounts of civic officials are rare and fragmentary.1 The following document is the only detailed financial record prior to the sixteenth century of a Scottish provost (also known as an alderman).2 The burgh in question is Aberdeen, although this document is not part of Aberdeen’s main council register series which has in recent years been the subject of major research grants and in 2019 was published in a digital edition, the Aberdeen Registers Online: 1398–1511 (hereafter ARO).3 As financial matter, the next most comparable records are partial lists of expenditures by provost and bailies c. 1399,4 and summary accounts of bailies, and two provosts, in the 1430s.5 Thereafter are the earliest surviving guildry accounts from 1452–3 (after which date these do not survive until 1548), and the treasury accounts which survive only from 1559.6 Whereas the council registers contain a range of financial material, including the details of annual rentals of burgh properties in the earlier volumes,7 records of a number of tax levies raised from inhabitants (known as stents),8 and more indirectly the levying of fines as a pervasive form of punishment and the details of countless commercial transactions and disputes, they do not (with the partial exceptions just noted) include the financial accounts associated with burgh officers. Arrangements for the administration of burgh finances were set out in 1437–8,9 further amended in 1442,10 and again changed by practice in 1480, leading to royal and conciliar scrutiny in 1487 and 1492.11 The record presented here contains the provost’s receipts and his expenditures pertaining to his official capacity during his twelve months in post. Those who were to act as auditors of these accounts, and of the accounts of certain other civic officials, were elected by the burgesses as the provost’s term of service came to a close and his successor was chosen.12 The burgh’s regulations were that a provost should submit his accounts within forty days of leaving office.....