The Ayr Manuscript

Notes adapted from the introduction to volume 1 of The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, edd C Innes and T Thomson, at pp 179-181.

This manuscript, of the age of Robert I (1306-1329), appears to have belonged, in the fifteenth century, to the Burgh of Ayr, or perhaps to the Clerk of the Council or Guildry of that burgh. Of its latter history nothing is known. It was purchased at a book-stall in Ayr, in the year 1824, by Mr Ebenezer Thomson, one of the masters in the Ayr Academy, from whom it was acquired for the General Register House (now the National Archives of Scotland) at Edinburgh.

It is an octavo volume, still in old oak boards, containing 83 leaves of vellum, 8 inches high by 51/2 inches wide, written, with the exception of some manifest interpolations, in a fine and uniform hand, of the early half of the 14th century, with red initial letters and titles. The volume, in its original shape, has consisted of six quires or fasciculi, each numbered on the outer leaf; of which markings five still remain. The first quire (fol 9-19) contains only nine leaves, one having been cut away; the second (fol 20-29) ten; the third and fourth, each sixteen (fol 30-61); the fifth ten, and the sixth (fol 62-83) of which the outer leaf probably containing the number, is gone, now consists of twelve.