418 Incorporated Trades of Dumfries. 



shall call ; and no money was to be spent on such occasions from 

 the incorporation funds. This Act does not seem, however, to 

 have been generally observed; for in 1753 we have record of a 

 complaint made to the Seven Incorporations by a part of the 

 trade that the funds were misapplied by unnecessary drinking and 

 in other ways. They were prohibited from spending any money 

 belonging to the incorporation " upon any account whatever, 

 except upon the necessary affairs thereof," and the General Com- 

 mittee reserved to itself a power of audit of the accounts. They 

 are also prohibited from paying out of the trade funds any 

 expenses of law suits between individual members. Other trades 

 were exercised by similar excesses. The Wrights, for example, 

 found it necessary to restrict the spending at their Deacon's 

 election to twenty shillings of the corporation's funds. 



In the quotation which I made from a Glasgow Seal of Cause 

 it was stipulated that a freeman of the craft must first be a burgess 

 of the town. I do not find in the Dumfries trades records that 

 such a condition was enforced. The general form of record is 

 simply that the applicant presented a petition to be booked 

 freeman, which was found reasonable, and he paid the composi- 

 tion and gave his oath of fidelity. In some cases it is further 

 recorded that he " made his essay of work assigned to him to the 

 satisfaction of all the members." One entry in the Wrights' 

 records, of date January, 1774, does set forth regarding two 

 masons that they " underwent their essay and produced their Act 

 of Freedom as burgesses of the burgh, and were admitted and 

 received freemen of the incorporation as masons on payment of 

 the composition as Neutrals of ;£^io sterling each." But it is a 

 solitary record of the kind. 



A very interesting aspect of the Weavers' records is that 

 which concerns the "Landward Freemen." The privileges of 

 the incorporations had reference primarily, of course, to the area 

 of the burgh. But Acts of the Convention of Burghs and of 

 Town Councils, passed in the sixteenth century, sought to make 

 their monopoly more effectual by extending their jurisdiction to 

 the suburbs of towns and a radius of half-a-mile beyond the 

 town walls ; no craftsman being at liberty to follow his occupation 

 within these limits without being enrolled as a freeman. The 

 Brig-end of Dumfries, which we now know as the town of Max- 

 welltown, fell within this rule; and we have frequent mention ia 



