The Signet Library 200th Anniversary Online Exhibition

Signet Library Collection Guides

Session Papers as a Phenomenon: Genre and Afterlife

The Session Papers as first received into the judges’ boxes would most likely be identified by a modern bibliographer as ephemera, and as a pamphlet - a work of anything from four to (less often) a hundred pages, created for a single time-bound purpose, coverless or in paper covers and simply bound - most often possessed of no more than a stab binding. Many Session Papers do indeed survive in this form, especially outwith the large Edinburgh institutional collections at the Advocates and Signet Libraries. However, the paper and printing is usually of a high standard - set alongside chapbooks or broadsides, Session Papers are luxury products of sober design. The decorative printing blocks which adorn the first decade or so of printed Session Papers after the Union fall out of use, and the choice of paper size gradually settles around a standard quarto, with variations thereafter being largely artifacts of subsequent rebinding. If Session Papers are ephemera, they are ephemera of an unusually professional and well-constructed form. 

They are also ephemera that enjoy amongst its authors some of the greatest thinkers and writers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The legal profession’s role as a birthplace of Enlightenment thought and activity is beginning now to be properly recognised, although much work remains before this is properly fleshed out. The writers of surviving Session Papers include Henry Home, who as Lord Kames would first describe the now-familiar four-stage account of human civilisation beginning with hunter-gatherers and ending with modern commercial society. Hugh Milne’s brilliant editorship of James Boswell’s Session Papers is still a work in progress. Sir Walter Scott wrote Session Papers early in his career as an Advocate. Other names to be found at the end of Session Papers include Francis Jeffrey, Henry Cockburn and Henry Brougham, and the Papers offer the chance to witness some of the finest minds in Scotland’s history in direct involvement with the conflicts and arguments of the society which gave them birth. Looking beyond such Enlightenment writers, the authors of the Session Papers include figures of great significance in the wider history of the nation, including Lord Covington, whose dramatic intervention in the Jacobite trials at Carlisle after the ‘45 saved many lives, members of the Hope and Dundas dynasties of lawyer-politicians, and judges like Lord Kennet, who played roles in the ending of slavery and the evolution of modern ideas of copyright. Every issue of life shows up in the Session Papers at some stage, every major figure in Georgian Scotland, every city and settlement. All human life is here. 

Session Papers survive principally because a series of lawyers, overwhelmingly Advocates, collected and kept them after the case that they concerned was complete. Practically every instance of such collections exhibits as bound volumes containing anything between twenty and fifty individual Session Papers. In the vast majority of the court cases dealt with by Session Papers, it is not known what would comprise a complete set of the printed papers for the case, and it is often found that different papers for a particular case are to be found in different case collections. The organisation of bound volumes of cases differs within collections and from collector to collector: some volumes collect similar types of cases, especially “political” cases involving the link between land ownership and voting, and teinds. Others follow a rough chronological order, and some group Session Papers together with printed legislation or with pamphlets of different kinds. Although most collectors who are known to have bound their collections appear to have referred to them as “Session Papers” and entitle their volumes accordingly, other variants exist - “Law Papers”, “Pamphlets” etc. 

The purposes for which individual collectors engaged in the retention of Session Papers are concealed by the failure of any individual collector to record what they were doing, how, and why. It is generally thought that the collecting drive was professional in nature. Because no record existed of the thought processes by which judges in the Inner House reached their verdicts, possession of the Session Papers gave access at least to the facts, arguments and authorities which had been under consideration. It is also apparent that Advocates and Judges kept their own Session Papers from cases in which they had been involved, sometimes alongside the Session Papers of other lawyers in the case. 

The two largest modern institutional collections are those held in Edinburgh by the Advocates Library and the Signet Library. Both collections are comprised not only of collections of Session Papers gathered by individuals and then presented to, bequeathed to or purchased by the institutions at a later moment but also of Papers gathered by both institutions themselves. Both libraries were engaged in collecting of their own at different intensities and at different times as the eighteenth century wore on. After the introduction of the Session Cases law reports in 1821, both institutions built near-complete collections of Session Papers concerning and organised around the cases featured in the Reports, whilst continuing to acquire older papers by gift or by auction. 

Session Papers therefore progressed from their intense birth and first point of use and moved into a new kind of existence as part of larger collections, used as a store of legal reference and knowledge and in the ownership firstly of individual collecting lawyers and later of collecting legal libraries and institutions. Both collectors and institutions sought on different occasions to create organisational apparatus to facilitate this use of Session Papers. Some collectors indexed individual volumes or sets of volumes. There are two eighteenth century manuscript index volumes to Session Papers in the Signet Library dealing with different collections acquired by the Library, in addition to which there are two printed classified indexes to 1790s Session Papers created by Robert Bell WS in relation to his efforts to improve the reporting of Court decisions. Some Signet Library Session Papers, once individual collections but later acquired by the Library, display efforts on the part of the Writers to the Signet to cross-reference cases in their collection both with each other and with existing published collections of Court decisions such as those of Falconer or Elchies. 

However, it is apparent that after 1850 Session Papers from the pre-reform Court were finding a new purpose as a repository of historical evidence, and they begin to appear in the footnotes of works of history just as they begin to fade from those of works of law. Speaking of the Court of Session Records at Register House, David Murray said:

I found them to be full of interest and to give information upon a great variety of local matters. They relate to Scotland as a whole, so that the information they contain is not limited to one county, to one class, or to one industry. The information, too, is brought together in periods. All sorts of people come upon the scene, men prominent in their day, others before unheard of; place-names long forgotten are revived, local events are recorded from year to year. We learn of sea adventures and trading by land, of prices and values of articles of all kinds. Anyone interested in the history of a particular place, of an industry, of social conditions and the like will find much to help him during any period he may select.. [Dr. David Murray: Scottish local records and the Report of the Departmental Committee of 1925 on Sheriff Court Records. Glasgow: Jackson, Wylie & Co., 1927 p.31]

Over the three centuries since printed pleadings first began to appear, the Session Papers have meant different things to different people. Today they can be found in their original stab-bound form, or bound in paper covers, or bound in hard covers as individual documents, or bound as collections of Session Papers. Successive rebindings mean that practically every common form of bookbinding and book dressing can be found among the Session Papers, and they offer scholars of the material history of the book a superb case study in the shift of purpose and physical form under the pressures of professional and societal change.