The Citizen by Andrew Brown

Author:Andrew Brown [Andrew Brown and John Griffiths]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780994147387
Publisher: Massey University Press
Published: 2017-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

However, it was within the general category of people that there existed the greatest proscriptions during times of plague, applied both to those seeking entry to the burgh and to those already within it. Consequent civic legislation articulated starkly the categorisation of individuals and groups in accordance with those who were deemed, indeed permitted, to belong to the community and those who were not. In common with other urban authorities, when plague was rumoured or confirmed to have broken out in the vicinity, Aberdeen’s council sought initially to prevent sources of infection from entering the city’s boundaries through the imposition of a cordon sanitaire, which involved primarily the monitoring of official entrances to the burgh (the gates or ‘ports’ and the harbour) and the vetting of arrivals. Throughout the entire plague period (that is, to ca. 1650) civic officials in Aberdeen were greatly helped in their task by the coastal location of the city and by the inhospitableness of its surrounding topography, which made access difficult whether by road or by sea.

Although in theory, therefore, vetting visitors to the city — whether through the ports, over the rivers or at the harbour — was an achievable precaution in times of plague, tardiness by magistrates in implementing such measures and negligence by those charged with the task meant that interlopers gained access on an alarmingly regular basis during outbreaks, a situation exacerbated by the influx of migrants from the hinterland seeking employment or at least sustenance in such times of economic crisis and dearth of victuals.21 Successive councils were also hindered in their attempts to regulate visitors by the illicit entry to the town, often ‘under silence of night’, of those coming in via unguarded access points. In common with most of Scotland’s towns at this time, Aberdeen was not walled, and the security of the burgh was to a great extent dependent on the vigilance of those residents whose back walls and gates effectively delineated its external boundaries. Convictions during both of Aberdeen’s sixteenth-century epidemics for the illegal scaling of external walls and the unlawful lodging of outsiders show that residents could prioritise the provision of hospitality to family and friends over a concern for health and safety, whether their own or that of the wider community.22

Accepting that interlopers might yet gain entry, officials were tasked to patrol the streets of each quarter, making home visitations if necessary, in order to root out illicit visitors and suspected cases of sickness which were also required to be notified to the authorities. For the social theorist Michel Foucault, early modern ‘plague management was the political dream’, as the powers this gave for civic control over the movements of everyone into and within the town, under the guise of a concern for public health, created what he regarded as ‘the utopia of the perfectly governed city’.23

It entailed the targeting of those whose presence might be considered socially undesirable for ideological no less than practical reasons. This was evident in the civic approach to

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