Traders and Merchants

Edinburgh's tightly controlled burgess network, which was regulated by the Town Council, strongly defined the middle orders. It also controlled the limits of what was politically tolerable for those looking to make their way in society via the trade and craft incorporations of the city: Chirurgons and Barbouris (who separated in 1722), Goldsmythis, Skinners and Furriers, Hammermen, Wrights and Masons, Tailors, Baxters, Fleschouris, Curdwainers, Wabstaris, Waekaris [hatters], Bonnet-Makers, and Dyers and Candlemakers. Control of the system was strongly identified with the exercise of political control on a wider stage, as burgess privileges and licensing were an established route to patronage. On 9 May 1660, three weeks before Charles II landed in England, the Town Council ‘ordained all burgess and guild brother tickets to be written out in the King's name, as formerly “befoir the invasion of the English”’.

There were about two thousand burgesses in the city in the 1660s, but their number and ability to exercise monopoly declined with time. As the historian Rab Houston has pointed out with regard to the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, about 10 per cent of burgesses were excused the political oaths to make allowances for those whom it was desired to incorporate irrespective of their (usually Jacobite) politics, while conversely, oaths might be strictly administered with the goal of excluding someone. In the world of Edinburgh society, there were strongly specified ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ in both formal and informal social demarcation. Being a burgess ‘enhanced individual status by giving access to social contacts, power through office holding and employing, economic opportunities, and welfare services’. The Council licensed foreign craftsmen, which gave them a route into Edinburgh society and patronage, and, significantly, women also received burgess licences. On 8 September 1708, licence was granted ‘to Elizabeth Skeen, daughter of the deceast Mr Thomas Skeen, advocate, to trade in this city, liberties and priviledges thereof, and that during all the days of her life’, while on 10 August 1709, the Council granted ‘licence to Sarah Dalrymple … to use her trade of japanning as a burges of this city all the days of her lifetime … providing always she employ the freemen of this city for the timber work’. Shorter licences were also granted for seven years, and women burgesses were expected to remain unmarried.