News

2025 Stair Society AGM and Annual Lecture

The Stair Society’s 90^th Annual General Meeting will be held in the Mackenzie Building, Old Assembly Close, Edinburgh on Saturday 15 November 2025 by courtesy of the Faculty of Advocates.

For members, the business part of the meeting will take place from 10:30 to 11:00 am, after which tea and coffee will be served prior to the Annual Lecture.

At 11:30 am Professor Julian Goodare, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh, will give the Annual Lecture.  The title of his presentation is “Witchcraft and Scots Law”.

In this lecture, Professor Goodare will discuss the laws and legal procedures that were used to prosecute witches in Scotland. Witchcraft was a statutory criminal offence between 1563 and 1736, and about two and a half thousand executions were carried out in this period. Two main types of evidence were used in court: neighbours’ testimony about magical harm, or the suspect’s confession to the demonic pact. The lecture will discuss the procedures by which local courts first converted initial suspicions into formal evidence, and central authorities then processed that evidence in order to authorise criminal trials.

The lecture is not restricted to members of the Society, but non-members wishing to attend are asked to advise the Secretary and Treasurer in advance of their intention to attend. Non-members can do this by emailing: stairsociety@gmail.com.

2024 Stair Society Annual Lecture

The Stair Society’s Annual General Meeting was held in the Mackenzie Building, Old Assembly Close, Edinburgh on Saturday 16 November 2024 by courtesy of the Faculty of Advocates.

It was given by Professor Cynthia Neville will give the Annual Lecture. Her title is ‘March Law as Auld Law in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Legal Traditions’.

Professor Neville is Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She is also Adjunct Professor of History, Centre for Scottish Studies, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

A synopsis of Professor Neville’s lecture is as follows:

‘Historians have long been familiar with the text known as Leges Marchiarum (Laws of the Marches), the earliest extant version of which is found in the National Records of Scotland’s Berne Manuscript, datable to the period 1267 x 1272. In the late medieval and early modern periods the kings of Scotland and the jurists who studied, interpreted, and wrote the law on their behalf came to regard the Leges Marchiarum treatise as a fundamental witness to the early development of written law in the medieval kingdom.

‘This lecture is based on an ongoing study of some twenty-one extant manuscript versions of the Leges Marchiarum treatise, beginning with its first instantiation in the Berne Manuscript and continuing with a discussion of its later witnesses in compilations of auld Scots law down to the 1590s. Seventeen of the texts are in Latin; the remaining four in Older Scots.

‘The lecture discusses, first, the background to the drafting of the treatise in the thirteenth century, then moves to a review of the textual additions, accretions and alterations made to the text over this long period, paying particular attention to the legal and political circumstances under which the compilers of books of auld law effected these changes.

‘The lecture explores briefly the means by which the early modern authors of vernacular Scots lawbooks coped with the challenges inherent in translating the archaic Latin legal terminology of the Leges Marchiarum treatise, and finishes with an examination of the ways in which the little thirteenth-century treatise retained its fundamental authority, not only among Scottish jurists, but also among the Scottish officials who worked on behalf of the crown in the Scottish march lands.’

Professor Neville’s address can be viewed on our Lectures page.