¹ Archibald Alison, ‘Causes of the Increase of Crime’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, lvi (1844), 1–14 at 1–3.

² See Robert Sindall, ‘The Criminal Statistics of Nineteenth-Century Cities: A New Approach’, Urban History Yearbook, 13 (1986), 28–36 at 29.

³ For further discussion of Scottish jurisdictions see Anne-Marie Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland (Woodbridge, 2007), ch. 2, and also Stephen J. Davies, ‘The Courts and the Scottish Legal System, 1600–1747: The Case of Stirlingshire’, in Victor Gatrell, Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker, eds., Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe Since 1500 (London, 1980), 120–54.

⁴ The punishment of Scottish offenders will not be specifically addressed in this chapter, but will be referred to where pertinent. For further discussion of this topic see Anne-Marie Kilday, ‘Women and Crime in South-west Scotland: A Study of the Justiciary Court Records 1750–1815’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Strathclyde, 1998), ch. 6.

⁵ Margaret A. Crowther, ‘Scotland: A Country With No Criminal Record’, Scottish Economic and Social History, 12 (1992), 82–6 at 82. I am grateful to Dr Bill Knox (University of St Andrews) for alerting me to this reference.

⁶ See for instance James A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1550–1750 (London, 1999); Julius R. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 2001); Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900 (London, 1996); Ted R. Gurr, ed., Violence in America: The History of Crime (Newbury Park, CA, 1989), and Anne-Marie Kilday and David S. Nash, eds., Histories of Crime: Britain 1600–2000 (Basingstoke, 2010). For further discussion of the dearth of scholarship on Scottish crime history see Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland, ch. 1.

⁷ For examples of scholarship that demonstrate the potential of studying Scottish crime see Marion M. Stewart, ‘In Durance Vile: Crime and Punishment in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Records of Dumfries’, Scottish Archives: The Journal of the Scottish Records Association, i (1995), 63–74; John G. Harrison, ‘Women and the Branks in Stirling c.1600–c.1730’, Scottish Economic and Social History, xviii (1998), 114–31; Ian Donnachie, ‘“The Darker Side”: A Speculative Survey of Scottish Crime during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Scottish Economic and Social History, xv (1995), 5–24, and Margaret A. Crowther, ‘Criminal Precognitions and their Value for the Historian’, Scottish Archives: The Journal of the Scottish Records Association, i (1995), 75–84.

⁸ This orthodoxy is outlined in Christopher A. Whatley, ‘How Tame were the Scottish Lowlanders during the Eighteenth Century?’, in Thomas M. Devine, ed., Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society 1700–1850 (Edinburgh, 1990), 3.

⁹ See for instance T. Christopher Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830, (London, 1969), 303–10 and 417.

¹⁰ See Whatley, ‘How Tame were the Scottish Lowlanders?’, 1–30, and Christopher A. Whatley, Scottish Society 1707–1820: Beyond Jacobitism, Towards Industrialisation (Manchester, 2000), chs. 4 and 5.

¹¹ For further discussion see Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland, ch. 6.

¹² See for instance Whatley, ‘How Tame were the Scottish Lowlanders?’, 1–30; Whatley, Scottish Society, chs. 4 and 5; and especially K. J. Logue, Popular Disturbances in Scotland 1780–1815 (Edinburgh, 1979).

¹³ As indictments for witchcraft were rare amongst the Justiciary Court material between 1700 and 1830, the offence will not be analysed in this chapter. For relevant works on witchcraft see Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-hunt in Scotland (London, 1981), and Julian Goodare, ed., The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context (Manchester, 2002). For relevant works on infanticide see Deborah A. Symonds, Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park, PA, 1997); Anne-Marie Kilday, ‘“Monsters of the Vilest Kind”: Infanticidal Women and Attitudes to their Criminality in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, Family and Community History, 11, no. 2 (2008), 100–15, and the essays by Anne-Marie Kilday, ‘Maternal Monsters: Murdering Mothers in South-west Scotland, 1750–1815’, Lynn Abrams, ‘From Demon to Victim: The Infanticidal Mother in Shetland, 1699-1802’, inYvonne G. Brown and Rona Ferguson, eds., Twisted Sisters: Women, Crime and Deviance in Scotland since 1400 (East Linton, 2002), 156–79 and 180–203 respectively.

¹⁴ For further discussion see Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland, passim.

¹⁵ For discussion of the predominance of property crimes in Europe during the early modern period see Michael R. Weisser, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe (Hassocks, 1979), 16.

¹⁶ See Kilday, ‘Women and Crime in South-west Scotland’, chs. 4, 5, and 7.

¹⁷ See respectively National Records of Scotland (NRS), Justiciary Court (JC) 13/11; JC3/31; JC26/144; JC12/9.

¹⁸ For further discussion of this crime see Anne-Marie Kilday, ‘Women and Crime’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus, eds., Women’s History: Britain 1750–1800—An Introduction (Abingdon, 2005), 174–93 at 178.

¹⁹ For further discussion see for instance David Taylor, Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1750–1914 (Basingstoke, 1998), 32–3, and David Philips, Crime and Authority in Victorian England: The Black Country 1835–1860 (London, 1977), 246–8.

²⁰ Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1989), 5–6. See also David Brandon, Stand and Deliver: A History of Highway Robbery (Stroud, 2001), 158–71.

²¹ NRS JC11/25.

²² See for instance John M. Beattie, ‘The Criminality of Women in Eighteenth-Century England’, The Journal of Social History, 8 (1975), 80–116 at 90; Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 235; Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 109.

²³ See the comparisons drawn in Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland, 134.

²⁴ NRS JC12/17 and National Library of Scotland (NLS) L.C. Fol. 73 (076).

²⁵ For further discussion see Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland, 43–4 and 63–6.

²⁶ See James A. Sharpe, ‘Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal, 24 (1981), 29–48.

²⁷ See respectively NRS JC26/108, JC12/9, NLS 6.365 (104), and Ry. III. a 2 (78).

²⁸ For further discussion of this offence in a Scottish context see the references in note 13 above as well as Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland, ch. 4, and David S. Nash and Anne-Marie Kilday, Cultures of Shame: Exploring Crime and Morality in Britain 1600–1900 (Basingstoke, 2010), ch. 3.

²⁹ See respectively NRS JC3/2, JC12/4, JC11/8, JC13/14, and JC11/47. Supplementary material on these cases can be found in the relevant process papers (JC26).

³⁰ For further discussion of Norbert Elias’s theory of the ‘civilizing process’ in relation to Scottish society see Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland, Conclusion.

³¹ See, for instance John M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 75–6, and James A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study (Cambridge, 1983), 117–19.

³² For further discussion on the problems with investigating sexual violence historically see Anna Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770–1845 (London, 1987), and Kim Stevenson, ‘“Most Intimate Violations”: Contextualising the Crime of Rape’, in. Nash and Anne-Marie Kilday, eds., Histories of Crime: Britain 1600–2000 (Basingstoke, 2010), ch. 4.

³³ These bills are called Letters of Lawburrows and can be found in the Justiciary Court Process Papers (JC26). See for example NRS JC26/579/92 brought by John Campbell (Argyll).

³⁴ For further discussion of domestic assault in early modern Scotland see Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland, 87–92. For further discussion of this offence in the early modern period more widely see Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2003), and Elizabeth Foyster, Marital Violence: An English Family History 1660–1850 (Cambridge, 2005).

³⁵ See respectively NRS JC13/1 (I am very grateful to Dr Katherine D. Watson for alerting me to this reference), JC11/9, JC12/14, and JC26/371.

³⁶ For further discussion of these protests see the references in notes 11–12 above.

³⁷ See NRS JC3/33.

³⁸ See respectively NRS JC12/11 and JC26/220.

³⁹ For further discussion of trends in Scottish criminality over the course of the eighteenth century, see Kilday, ‘Women and Crime in South-west Scotland’, ch. 7.

⁴⁰ For further discussion see Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland, Conclusion.

⁴¹ As indicated above, studies of more ‘regular’ criminality in other jurisdictions may provide different conclusions to the ones presented here. This kind of analysis is inadequate at present, but examples of the limited work that has been done include Frank Bigwood, ‘The Courts of Argyll, 1664–1825’, Scottish Archives, 10 (2004), 26–38; Christopher A. Whatley, ‘The Union of 1707, Integration and the Scottish Burghs: The Case of the 1720s Food Riots’, Scottish Historical Review, 78 (1999), 192–218, and J. R. D. Falconer, ‘Mony Utheris Divars Odious Crymes’: Women, Petty Crime and Power in Later Sixteenth-Century Aberdeen’, Crimes and Misdemeanours: Deviance and the Law in Historical Perspective [SOLON On-line Journal], 4, no. 1 (2010), 7–36.

⁴² For further discussion of the influence of the Church on matters of Scottish criminality see Nash and Kilday, Cultures of Shame, ch. 3.