at was previously known was
not earlier than the sixteenth century. Portions of the Deer Manuscript
have been pronounced by competent scholars to be seven centuries older.

The most ancient known collection of the laws of Scotland--a manuscript
written about 1270--was detected in the public library of Berne, and
lately restored to this country. In 1824, Mr. Thomson, a schoolmaster at
Ayr, picked up, on an old bookstall in that town, a valuable manuscript
collection of Scotch burghal laws written upwards of four centuries
ago.

Sometimes, as in this last instance, documents of great value in
Scottish Archaeology have made narrow escapes from utter loss and
destruction.

I was told by the late Mr. Thomas Thomson--a gentleman to whom we are
all indebted for promoting and systematising our studies--that a
miscellaneous, but yet in some points valuable collection of old vellum
manuscripts was left, at the beginning of the present century, by a poor
peripatetic Scottish tailor, who could not read one word of the old
black letter documents which he spent his life and his purse in
collecting. Being a visionary claimant to one of the dormant Scottish
peerages, he buoyed himself up with the bright hope that some clever
lawyer would yet find undoubted proofs of his claims in some of the
written parchments which he might procure. Sir Robert Cotton is said to
have discovered one of the original vellum copies of the Magna Charta in
the shop of another tailor, who, holding it in his hand, was preparing
to cut up this charter of the liberties of England into tape for
measuring some of England's sons for coats and trousers. The missing
manuscript of the History of Scotland, from the Restoration to 1681,
which was written by Sir George Mackenzie, the King's Advocate, was
rescued from a mass of old paper that had been sold for shop purposes to
a grocer in Edinburgh. Some fragments of the Privy Council Records of
Scotland--now preserved in the General Register House--were bought among
waste snuff-paper.[15] Occasionally even a very small preserved fragment
of an ancient document has proved of importance. Mr. Robertson informs
me that, in editing the old Canons of the Scottish Church, he has
derived considerable service from a single leaf of a contemporary record
of the Canons of the sixteenth century, which had been used and
preserved in the old binding of a book. This single leaf is the only bit
of manuscript of the Scotch sixteenth ce