Attendees at the last WS Society Annual Dinner may recall the small exhibition in the lobby which commemorated the 110th anniversary of the donation to the Signet Library of the manuscript of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Bride of Lammermoor. On display that evening was a legal manuscript in the Society’s collections which a re-cataloguing project had revealed to be a seventeenth century manuscript copy of the Earl of Stair’s pivotal work The Institutions of the Law of Scotland which brought all of the disparate elements of the Scottish law into one system for the first time.
Stair had originally written the work in 1659-1662, and it had circulated in handwritten form, revised in 1666, until its first printing in 1682. The Signet Library holds four of these handwritten copies, known as the Anderson, Burnside, Smyth and Lamb manuscripts, and they are among the earlier of the copies that survive in the world’s libraries and other collections. The new discovery – the Lamb MS – has just been examined by Professor Adelyn Wilson, whose brilliant analysis of the Stair MS in Scottish libraries was published by the Stair Society in 2015.
Research is still continuing, but at present it appears likely that the Lamb MS is “an early example of the earliest text” and related to the Brousterland MS in the second largest identifiable “group” of the Stair MS. This means that with the other three Signet Library MS representing Stair’s 1666 revisions, and finding places in each of the main three “family trees” of Stair MS (related by one MS being copied from another and identified as such by internal evidence), the Signet Library collection of Stair MS can demonstrate and display most of the process that led to the first and second printed editions of Stair’s Institutions. The Library holds excellent examples of all of the printed editions, so the story of this most important Scottish legal text can be found and told from within our own walls.