This post is about something I forgot to mention here when it happened last year. I contributed to the WS Society’s online exhibition, The Great Affair is to Move: Travel and Topography at the Signet Library. This was originally going to be an in-person event in early spring 2020, but had to be cancelled as…
“Miss Graham, I cannot go out but I am dunn’d with poor Mally’s light carriage with the servants and others in the neighbourhood, which you cannot but know. If she behave so now, What will she do afterwards? which has given me more uneasiness than all I heard from Moffat. It is not my children, but every body will talk. I wish I may be preserved from danger at this time of life, and not be made a speech to the whole country. I hope there is no harm done, is all from, your most obedient servant. James Paisley.”
In February 1760, advocate Walter Steuart presented a petition to the Court of Session on behalf of his client, John Grieve, a taylor in Potter-row. [1] The petition was part of a long-standing dispute between Grieve and his neighbour John Neill, a barber and wig-maker. Their disagreement involved the use of a shared garden and…
As described in a previous post, Mr James Fennell was tormented by a mob of Edinburgh lawyers as he tried to work as an actor at the Theatre Royal during Mrs Siddon’s visit there in July 1788. The events did not escape the notice of the Caledonian Mercury and its reports provide more details about…
An angry group of Edinburgh theatre patrons targeted an actor, Mr James Fennell, for systematic abuse as he attempted to perform his role in ‘Venice Preserv’d, or a Plot Discover’d’ at the Theatre Royal on 9 July 1788. The unruly group had entered into a most unwarrantable and illegal combination and conspiracy, to interrupt the…
Henry Raeburn v. Andrew Kedslie This day the new jury court met in the Court of Exchequer, when their Lordships proceeded to try the case of RAEBURN &c. against KEDSLIE. This was an action relative to the erection of a steam engine at Stockbridge-mills, which the pursuers contend, is a nuisance. (Edinburgh Evening Courant, 22…
Tales from the Session Papers Continued from Part 1 Phebe Forbes’s former brother-in-law had little sympathy for her plight. David Scot’s ‘Answers’ via advocate Andrew Pringle of 19 December 1755, did not hide his obvious dislike for his sister-in-law. He accused her of gold-digging, not just as his brother’s wife but, since she had remarried,…
Tales from the Session Papers Phebe Forbes felt trapped and frustrated as she considered her options in the 1750s. Married young in 1752, she was a widow in the next year. She did not get along with her brother-in-law, David Scot (or Scott) of Hedderwick, who had control over the house she lived in as…
