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King James V’s Scottish legal reforms of 1532 created the College of Justice, an umbrella for the three wings of the Scottish legal profession – the Senators of the College of Justice (judges), the Faculty of Advocates (legally established by the Act but owning an existence from earlier times) and the Writers to the Signet (representing, to some degree, the wider body of Scottish legal agents). The importance of the College was evident in the early plans for the building of what is now the Signet Library, which began as a structure to offer facilities to all three branches, only becoming a WS monopoly in 1833) and the College is still an important legal entity today. The origins and early history of the College of Justice – and the role of Writers to the Signet within it – are the subject of a new work by Professor Andrew Simpson of the University of Aberdeen – The College of Justice: Government and Governance in Renaissance Scotland.

The implication here is that the legal careers of Writers to the Signet could only be enmeshed with the rest of the legal profession in Scotland and further afield. However, the nature of that relationship has historically only been understood as a professional phenomenon by practitioners in the moment. The history of Scotland’s legal establishment since the Reformation has been written largely as a history of the thinking and actions of members of the Faculty of Advocates and the Scottish Bench.

Scholarly reflection and study of the careers and work of legal agents, solicitors, procurators and notaries is a relatively modern phenomenon, driven chiefly by the work and writing of the University of Glasgow’s Professor John Finlay whose books and articles have over the last quarter century created a map and myriad jumping-off points for future work.

Finlay’s work provides a contrary view to the clean picture of a Writer to the Signet’s career given by the “1890” in which a young man serves his apprenticeship with his master and then, having been successfully examined by the WS Commissioners, takes the oath as a Writer to the Signet, assumes a partnership in his firm, marries and begets future Writers to the Signet. In The Lower Branches of the Legal Profession in Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh Law Review vol. 11 no. 1 pp. 31-61) the experience of John Frank, made WS in 1682 without having served the usual apprenticeship and who served five years as Treasurer. Aged fifty three in 1691 Frank passed Advocate following an examination in Roman Law, and went on to arbitrate between the Faculty, the Council and the WS in issues concerning the maintenance of the Outer House (Parliament Hall). He would go on to serve as Treasurer to the Faculty.

This evidence of the permeability of the different branches of the profession is reinforced by Finlay’s account of the attempts in 1599 and 1633 to build on the common interests of the Faculty and WS within the College of Justice by securing a merger of the two organisations. The 1633 attempt was rejected by the Writers to the Signet but the scheme would find its echo in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in discussions about the merger of the vast libraries built by the two bodies.

Finlay’s work on the WS seeks to understand the Writers to the Signet through an understanding of the relationships between the Society and other bodies, both institutionally and in the legal life of Scottish law. In his Men of Law in Pre-Reformation Scotland (Scottish Historical Review Monograph no.9. East Linton: Tuckwell Press. 2000) Finlay draws on the 1565 tax roll of Edinburgh and finds no great distinction then between Writers and Advocates in either social standing or income, although he notes that the leading Advocates were earning at a higher level than the most successful Writers to the Signet. This would change, and by the late eighteenth century a pattern is visible within legal families of a hierarchy of fates: the eldest son would study Roman Law on the continent with a view to becoming an advocate, his younger brother would enter into apprenticeship with a Writer to the Signet, and if funds were still available, the youngest would become a solicitor with the SSC.

Finlay’s work also draws attention to the way that the practical daily life of the law placed stress upon the stricter applications of the internal rules of the Writers to the Signet. Although a man was officially unable to become a Writer to the Signet before his 25th birthday, nonetheless young men were entering into apprenticeships rather earlier. Writers to the Signet were originally forbidden from practice in the lower courts of the realm; by the nineteenth century, regard for the standard of training of Writers to the Signet meant that they could call on greater fees to appear in local courts than the lawyers nominally qualified by local faculty membership to practice there.

The Society of Writers to HM Signet by its importance, weight and presence imposed a gravitational pull of its own. In The Community of the College of Justice: Edinburgh and the Court of Session, 1687-1808 (Edinburgh University Press 2013) Finlay describes how the structure, practice and administrative function of local legal faculties and societies across Scotland would often be shaped directly after WS Society practice.

These brief comments offer only a few examples of the relationship between the WS Society, its lawyers and the wider world, and those interested in the topic can refer to the reading list below. It was a relationship that perhaps climaxed in the Society’s profound involvement in the creation of the Law Society of Scotland in 1949, whose long-serving first secretary, war hero Robert Bertram Laurie, was a Writer to the Signet.

Further Reading

Finlay, John George Craig of Galashiels: The Life and Work of a Nineteenth Century Lawyer. Edinburgh University Press (2023).

Finlay, John The Admission Register of Notaries Public in Scotland, 1700-1799, 1800-1899 [4 vols]. Scottish Record Society: Edinburgh(2012-2018).

Finlay, John Legal Practice in Eighteenth-century Scotland. (Brill: Leiden, 2015).

Finlay, J. The Community of the College of Justice: Edinburgh and the Court of Session 1687-1808. (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2012).

Finlay, J. Men of Law in Pre-Reformation Scotland. (Tuckwell Press: East Linton, 2000).

Simpson, Andrew R.C. The College of Justice: Government and Governance in Renaissance Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025)