Transport networks in medieval Scotland: roads, routes and justice-ayres

In this chapter the evidence for the routes taken by royal justice-ayres, central to the administration of civil and criminal justice in later medieval Scotland, is assessed. The first aim is to provide detailed evidence that the later medieval justice-ayre was indeed a much more regular event than past scholarship tended to assume. The contention that justice-ayres were held on a reasonably regular basis throughout the later medieval period makes it possible to go on to a further conclusion, that this regularity and continuity of the system is good if indirect evidence for a later medieval road system and the major routeways in Scotland south of Forth and through the country’s north-eastern littoral from the Firth of Forth up to Inverness.