invariably a fugitive from the rural districts. It was a hard age for the dependant classes wherever they were; and the “bondman in-burgh” may at times have cast many a wistful glance towards the blue hills in the distance. Monopoly and exclusive dealing were only in accordance with the spirit and policy of the age; and must inevitably have arisen in every quarter, when it was enacted that every sale and purchase should be made “in port,” and in the presence of witnesses chosen “in burgh;” which must, of course, have concentrated all the traffic of the district connected with the burgh in the hands of the resident population. The subdivision of the Hundred was unknown in Scotland, and accordingly such privileges occasionally extended over the whole County or Sheriffdom; as in Edinburgh, and as in the case of Perth; where, perhaps in consequence of this wide monopoly, the unprivileged trader from other quarters was allowed to retail cloth during the summer, from Ascension Day to the 1st of August; though ordinarily the privileges of the burgh were only suspended during Fair-time. The Fair was in some respects a sort of regulated Saturnalia; none but the outlaw, the traitor, and the malefactor whose crime was of too deep a dye to admit of sanctuary, could be taken during its continuance; all else, whether debtors, runaways, or minor offenders of any description, being free from arrest, except they broke “the peace of the Fair,” when they were tried and punished, not by the ordinary magistrates of the burgh, but in a temporary Court, known universally as the Court of _Pies-poudrees_, or _Dusty-feet_. The Dustyfoot was the travelling pedlar, or merchant as he was called in Scotland, the original of the modern Haberdasher--or “man with a _Havresac_;” and as, in Fair-time, the _Stallenger_, or trader who sold from a temporary stall, or booth, could claim “_lot and cavyl_”--share and share--with the more dignified Burgher, with whom for the time he was upon an equality, it would have been contrary to the true northern principle of justice if he had been liable to be tried and punished in a strange Court, and by any other verdict than that of “his Peers,” the Community, for the time being, of the Fair. The Dustyfoot probably came by land, and only entered the burgh for traffic during Fair-time; but the sea, or the river, bore the vessel of the foreign trader to the burgh at all times, though, except when it was otherwise provided, as at Perth during summer time, the burghers alone could dispose of the traders’ wares, only salt or herrings being sold on board ship. All disputes between a foreign trader and a burgher were to be settled before the third flood of the tide.[329]