Royalty of the Burgh of Dumfries. 345 



and was feued out by the Maxwells and their successors in 

 small lots, originally to retainers resident in the Burgh with 

 liability for payment of a composition (or a year's rent subject 

 to certain deductions) on the entry of each singular successor. 

 The feu rights thus granted and all subsequent infeftments 

 and renewals of investiture were appropriately published, not 

 in the Burgh Register of Sasines (which was the record of 

 writs relating to subjects held burgage), but in the Particular 

 Register of feudal holdings, which was kept for Dumfriesshire 

 and the Stewartries of Kirkcudbright and Annandale, or in 

 the General Register of such holdings, which was kept at 

 Edinburgh. Attempts, many of them successful, to evade 

 liability for a composition by completing an ex facie burgage 

 title on which prescriptive possession followed without chal- 

 lenge by the superior has brought about the result that the 

 Moat Superiority, instead of extending, as it originally did, 

 over a compact area of 260 Scots acres, now affects only 52^ 

 acres imperial, several of the units of possession of to-day 

 (e.g., Huntingdon Lodge) being composite — part held in feu 

 and part burgage. The whole of the remainder of the royalty, 

 other than the 52^^ acres just referred to, and with the excep- 

 tion of any feu rights that may have been granted since 1874, 

 when subinfeudation in subjects within the royalty of a burgh 

 first received statutory sanction, is held burgage, and t^e writs 

 affecting it are recorded in the Burgh Register of Sasines. 



It is necessary to explain further that prior to i860 the 

 Town Clerk of a Royal Burgh had a monopoly in all conveyanc- 

 ing work relating to investiture in burgage rights. Not only 

 was he the Keeper of the Burgh Register, but he alone, of all 

 the legal practitioners in the town, could expede infeftment in 

 burgage subjects. This undoubtedly arose from the fact that, 

 according to the theory of burgage tenure, the Magistrates 

 were the King's bailies and were necessarily present in their 

 official capacity at the ceremooy of giving sasine by symbolical 

 delivery of hasp and staple. And the Town Clerk was of 

 course the Notary whom the Magistrates invariably employed 

 to record the details of the ceremony in his Protocol Book, 

 and who framed and expede the necessary instrument that 

 required to be engrossed in the Burgh Register. 



