Drawing together an international team of historians, lawyers and historical sociolinguists, this volume investigates urban cultures of law in Scotland, with a special focus on Aberdeen and its rich civic archive, the Low Countries, Norway, Germany and Poland from c. 1350 to c. 1650.

Jackson W. Armstrong is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He is the author of England's Northern Frontier: Conflict and Local Society in the Fifteenth-Century Scottish Marches (2020).

Edda Frankot is Associate Professor in History at Nord University in Bodø, Norway. She specialises in late medieval urban, maritime and legal history. She is the author of 'Of Laws of Ships and Shipmen'. Medieval Maritime Law and its Practice in Urban Northern Europe (2012).

INTRODUCTION: Investigating cultures of law in urban northern Europe PART I: Telling tales 1. Telling tales: maritime law in Aberdeen in the early sixteenth century PART II: Communication of law 2. Common books in Aberdeen, c. 1398-c. 1511 3. The language of medieval legal record as a complex multilingual code 4. The vernacularisation of the Aberdeen Council Registers (1398-1511) PART III: Jurisdiction and conflict 5. Urban law in Norwegian market towns: legal culture in a long fourteenth century 6. The burgh and the forest: burgesses and officers in fifteenth-century Scotland 7. Pax urbana. The use of law for the achievement of political goals 8. Recalcitrant brides and grooms. jurisdiction, marriage, and conflicts with parents in fifteenth-century Ghent PART IV: Law in practice, in and out of court 9. Legal business outside the courts: private and public houses as spaces of law in the fifteenth century 10. Conflicts about property: ships and inheritances in Danzig and in the Hanse area (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries) 11. 'Malice' and motivation for hostility in the burgh courts of late medieval Aberdeen PART V: Men of law in Scotland 12. Bells, clocks and the beginnings of 'lawyer time' in late medieval Scotland 13. Andrew Alanson: man of law in the Aberdeen Council Register, c. 1440-c. 1475? 14. Notaries and advocates in early modern Aberdeen