The troubles arising from corporation privileges were in these old times incessant. Any attempt by an unfreeman to execute work within the charmed circle was met with the sternest measures of repression and punishment, often involving great suffering to poor industrious men. Indeed, there is perhaps no class of facts more calculated than this to disenchant modern people out of the idea that the days of old were days of mutual kindliness and brothership. At the date noted, one William Somerville, a wright-burgess of Edinburgh, was engaged in some repairs upon the mansion of the Earl of Roxburgh, in the Canongate, when Thomas Kinloch, deacon of the wrights of that jurisdiction, came with assistants, and in a violent manner took away the whole of the tools which the workmen were using. This was done as a check to Edinburgh wrights coming and doing work in a district of which they were not free. Somerville, two days after, made a formal demand for the restoration of his ‘looms;’ but they were positively refused. The Earl of Roxburgh was a minor; but his curators felt aggrieved by Kinloch’s procedure, and accordingly concurred with Somerville in charging the Canongate deacon, before the Privy Council, with the commission of riot and oppression in the earl’s house. Apparently, if the Roxburgh mansion had been subject to the jurisdiction of the Canongate, the Council could not have given any redress; but it so happened, that when the earl’s ancestor, in 1636, gave up the superiority of the Canongate, he reserved his house as to be holden of the crown; therefore, the Canongate corporations had no title to interfere with the good pleasure of his lordship in the selection of workmen to do work in his house. The Council remitted this point of law to the Court of Session; but meanwhile ordered the restoration of Somerville’s tools.[94] [Sidenote: 1692.] As an example of the troubles connected with mercantile privilege, it may be well to introduce one simple case of the treatment of an interloper by the Merchant Company of Edinburgh, the members of which were the sole legalised dealers in cloth of all kinds in the city. In June 1699, it was reported to the Company that one Mary Flaikfield, who had formerly been found selling goods ‘off the mercat-day,’ and enacted herself to desist from the practice, had been found sinning again in the same manner. She was detected in selling some plaids and eight pieces of muslin to a stranger, and the goods were seized and deposited in the Merchants’ Hall. The poor woman at first alleged that she had only been conversing with this stranger, while the goods chanced to be lying beside her, and the Company was wrought upon to give back her goods, all except two pieces of the muslin, which they said they would detain till Mary could prove what she alleged.