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The importance of kinship and lordship in determining relationships within medieval Scotland has long been acknowledged. In the late sixteenth century, however, Scotland underwent an intensification of government in which the crown increasingly drew judicial processes within its own remit, replacing the private justice dispensed by regional elites with the public justice of the central courts in Edinburgh. The assumption might therefore be that the older obligations of kinship and lordship would have been overridden by the newly persistent demands for personal accountability to the crown. This article demonstrates instead that such obligations were still significant in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and that processes associated with traditional private justice were now being used in an unprecedented way by a Scottish crown, increasingly intolerant of violent crime. Familial and fictive familial obligations continued to shape how early modern Scottish society was organized and regulated. On a reconnu depuis tres longtemps l'importance des liens de parente et d'autorite dans l'etablissement des relations dans l'Ecosse medievale. Toutefois, a la fin du seizieme siecle, l'Ecosse subit une augmentation de l'ingerence du gouvernement dans la soeiete par laquelle la couronne annexa de plus en plus a son domaine de competence, des procedures judiciaires, remplacant la justice privee administree par des notables regionaux par la justice publique qui siegeait dans des palais de justice centraux a Edinbourg. Nous pourrions donc supposer que les nouvelles et incessantes exigences de vouer une responsabilite personnelle a la couronne semblent l'emporter sur les anciennes obligations de parente et d'autorite. Dans cet article, nous demontrons au contraire que de telles obligations etaient toujours un facteur important a la fin du seizieme et au debut du dix-septieme siecles et que des procedures alliees a la justice privee traditionnelle etaient employees de facon sans precedente par la couronne ecossaise qui demontrait de plus en plus une intolerance au crime violent. Les obligations familiales, fictives ou reelles, continuerent a servir de modele lors de l'organisation et reglement de la soeiete ecossaise au debut de l'ere moderne., As the right honorable the laird of Buccleuch by virtue of the general band has found caution and bound and obliged himself that the whole inhabitants of the bounds of [...]

In 1618, the playwright Ben Jonson walked from London to Edinburgh. In 2009 details of that walk were recovered in a manuscript account. In 2013, Jonson’s ‘Foot-Voyage’ was tweeted real-time from July to October, and a linked blog hosted a digital map deepened with information from the text. Jonson’s ‘virtual’ journey was to enhance public engagement, his absorption into new communities echoed by exchanges with their twenty-first-century inhabitants. Simultaneously, the tweets suggested the spatial-temporality of Jonson’s actions in a manner not discernable in the linear narrative, revealing their kinetic quality. This stimulated a rethinking of the walk’s historical temporality, which challenges the historical distance between walker and audience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]