One Latin household books survives from the reign of James IV, (National Records of Scotland, E32/1). It covers dates from 1511 to 1512, giving daily expenses of food for the households of James IV and that of Margaret Tudor. The accountant was the Bishop of Caithness. Like the later Scottish household books, it includes entries in journal form, with a daily header that often records where the royals were. Other expenses known as ‘oncosts’ include a boat sent north to collect the produce that formed part of the income of the Scottish crown.¹ The manuscript pages are brittle and have often been conserved and rebound.

Thursday 4 September 1511 is the second page (E32/1 f.2r-v) and one of the more colourful entries. Margaret Tudor went on pilgrimage to Whitekirk in East Lothian while the king was on his boat, the Great Michael at Leith. A cropped note on f.2v seems to be a technical accounting detail, the Abbot of Holyrood paid the expenses of Margaret’s household’s main meal during the excursion.

The book has some more on the ships over the year, there is a banquet on the Michael, and James spends several days at the Pool or Powes of Airth, where he built a dockyard, while Margaret stayed in her more comfortable bower at Linlithgow Palace. I’m not sure if 4 September was a special day for Margaret or at Whitekirk, but certainly a day to remember.

1. Aonghas MacCoinnich, ‘The Maritime Dimension to Scotland’s “Highland Problem”, ca. 1540–1630’, Journal of the North Atlantic, 12 (2019), pp. 47, 68. ↩︎