Burgh
A burgh (/ˈbʌrə/ BURR-ə) is an autonomous municipal corporation in Scotland, usually a city, town, or toun in Scots.
This type of administrative division existed from the 12th century, when King David I created the first royal burghs.
By 1130, David I (r. 1124–53) had established other burghs including Edinburgh, Stirling, Dunfermline, Haddington, Perth, Dumfries, Jedburgh, Montrose, Rutherglen and Lanark.
In the south-west, Glasgow, Ayr and Kirkcudbright were aided by the less profitable sea trade with Ireland and to a lesser extent France and Spain.
[4] Burghs were typically settlements under the protection of a castle and usually had a market place, with a widened high street or junction, marked by a mercat cross, beside houses for the burgesses and other inhabitants.
[4] Burghs were centres of basic crafts, including the manufacture of shoes, clothes, dishes, pots, joinery, bread and ale, which would normally be sold to "indwellers" and "outdwellers" on market days.
The councillors selected a number of their members to be bailies, who acted as a magistrates bench for the burgh and dealt with such issues as licensing.
These were growing industrial centres, and apart from the lack of a charter, they had identical powers and privileges to the royal burghs.
This property was used for the advantage of the inhabitants of the burgh, funding such facilities as public parks, museums and civic events.
"Police" in this sense did not refer to law enforcement, but to various local government activities summarised in the act as "paving, lighting, cleansing, watching, supplying with water, and improving such Burghs respectively, as may be necessary and expedient".
In many cases this led to the existence of two parallel burgh administrations, the town council and the police commissioners, each with the same membership, but separate legal identity and powers.
Since 1975 local authorities have been free to choose the title of their convener and provosts are appointed to chair a number of area and community councils.
The title of bailie ceased to have any statutory meaning in 1975, although modern area councils do sometimes make appointments to the office on a purely ceremonial basis.
This was a title held by one of the bailies of the burgh who presided over a Dean of Guild Court which was given the specific duty of building control.
The population of burgesses could be roughly divided between merchants and craftsmen, and the tensions between the interests of the two classes was often a feature of the cities.
Another variant pronunciation, /brʌf/ ⓘ, is heard in several Cumbrian place names, e.g. Burgh by Sands, Longburgh, Drumburgh, Mayburgh Henge.
The English language borough, like the Scots Burgh, is derived from the same Old English language word burh (whose dative singular and nominative/accusative plural form byrig sometimes underlies modern place-names, and which had dialectal variants including "burg"; it was also sometimes confused with beorh, beorg, 'mound, hill', on which see Hall 2001, 69–70).
Burgh in placenames is found in its greatest UK concentration in the East Anglia region of southern England, where also the word has taken the form bury, as in Canterbury.
[16] A number of other European languages have cognate words which were borrowed from the Germanic languages during the Middle Ages, including brog in Irish, bwr or bwrc, meaning 'wall, rampart' in Welsh, bourg in French, borgo in Italian, and burgo in Spanish (hence the place-name Burgos).
