Minute books
Origins of minute books
The term ‘minute book’ is a name given to two distinct types of historical record in Scotland. The first is a record of a meeting of a corporate body (such as a local authority committee or private company). The second type of minute book is a digest of a legal register or court record. The origins of both lie in the medieval Latin term ‘minuta scriptura’, meaning ‘small writing’, especially applied to the first draft made by a clerk of court proceedings (a more modern term is ‘scroll minutes’). These would be used later as an aid to finding a full entry in a register after the full ‘official’ version of the court business had been compiled (in the form of an act roll, register, or book of sederunt). By the 17th century the term ‘minute books’ was used in relation to the official record of the meetings of corporate bodies, such as commissioners of supply and kirk sessions, but separate minute books for legal registers and court records (either in the form of drafts from which official act books etc were compiled, or as digests compiled from official records to allow quicker searching) continued to be made by court officials.
Minute books to registers and court records
Examples of these survive from the 15th century. The most important, and frequently used for historical and legal purposes, are minute books to registers of sasines and registers of deeds. Their value is derived from two characteristics:
(a) they may contain references to documents not recorded in the full register.
(b) they are easier to search through than the full register (especially if the latter is not indexed).
Minute books of corporate bodies
Minute books of this type survive from the 16th century in Scotland, but large series of minute books are a 19th and 20th century phenomenon, due to the proliferation of local and central government and commercial companies. Minute books usually begin with the date and place of meeting, and a list of those present. This is called ‘the sederunt’, and another term for a minute book is ‘sederunt book’, which is more commonly applied to court records. (For a specific type of legal record in Scotland see the Knowledge Base entry for the Trust Sederunt Book). Thereafter the style can range from quite terse (merely recording formal decisions taken) to voluminous (summarising discussions among those present with other documents, such as reports and legal papers engrossed).
Related Knowledge Base entries
To find out more about some of the most important types of minutes used by Scottish historians click on one of the following entries:
Commissioners of Supply minutes
Parochial Board and Parish Council records
Poor relief – Board of Supervision and Local Government Board minutes
Compilers: Andrew Jackson, Robin Urquhart (both SCAN 2002); Olive Geddes (National Library of Scotland, 2002).
How can school board minutes help me trace the title to a school building?
if these survive for the parish concerned back to 1873, the opening pages usually list the schools being taken over by the Board and their status beforehand (for example, if the school was run by a church), and sometimes the owner of the property). Any subsequent dispositions in favour of the School Board (for example, land for a playground or an extension to the school) are often engrossed in the minutes. In searches of this kind, it is quite common to find that no title was drawn up, i.e. that neither the owner of the property on which the school building stood nor the school board went to the trouble of drawing up or registering a title deed. In other cases, where a formal conveyance was made, the title deed may include restrictions as to the use, such as a reversion to the previous owner if the building is no longer required for educational purposes.
What is a scroll minute book?
a scroll minute book is a book of minutes in rough draft, to be written up later for the official version. Occasionally both the scroll and official minutes survive for corporate bodies (e.g. kirk sessions), and slight discrepancies can be found between them.
Do parochial board/parish council minutes contain information about individual paupers?
they contain a brief record of new applications brought to the board by the inspector of the poor for each parish. Typically, these contain the name of the applicant, the reason for the application (e.g. old age, illness, injury at work) and the decision of the parochial board. In some cases, there will be additional information, such as the age and residence of the individual. It is rare to find detailed information on the family of the individual claimant. However, if poor relief applications do not survive for that parish, then the minute books of the board/council may be the only record of a pauper’s application.
What does the word ‘sederunt’ mean?
‘Sederunt’ is a Latin word, meaning ‘there sat down’, i.e. when a record of a meeting begins ‘sederunt’ followed by a list of names, it indicates that those named sat down to hold a meeting or to form a court.