Introduction

Abstract

The history of capital punishment has been the focus of extensive and sustained investigation, with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offering a particularly pervasive attraction to crime historians of Western Europe. However, studies of the Scottish experience have remined limited. This study provides the first in-depth investigation into the implementation of the death sentence and the carrying out of capital punishment in Scotland. It is shaped by the most thorough gathering and analysis of the Scottish Justiciary Court records to date and draws upon previously untapped resources offering rich qualitative detail related to the country's capital punishment history. The study is focused upon the whole of Scotland to provide a national history of capital punishment whilst also exploring key regional variations over time. Within this, it seeks to provide a fresh perspective upon key events in eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Scottish history including Anglo-Scottish relations in the post-Union period, the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion and the rapid urbanisation, and population growth and density, witnessed in parts of the country, and how these things impacted upon the use of the death sentence.This period in Scotland's capital punishment history offers the potential for rich analysis as, following the 1707 Act of Union (6 Ann c.11), Scotland and England were governed by the same Parliament at Westminster. However, Scotland had maintained its own legal and court systems and, as this study will demonstrate, was distinct in its application of the criminal law. The following chapters will show that Britain's capital CHAPTER 1