This is not a history of Ayr but rather an attempt to put together a picture of the people who lived there from the 1420s onwards. From the very beginning, the people of Ayr are very much alive in the records of the town. Sometimes we get only a glimpse of their lives - James McCaffey pulling a knife on an alderman and getting away with a fine ; John McNedar, a chaplain in the kirk, fighting in the streets and condemned by a church court as a rapist and ' despiser of women'. ; the nine women at Christmas 1436 who were issued with a begging bowl and a clapper " that they may be known by" because they had leprosy ; Thomas Rait, another chaplain and a university graduate who turned Protestant at the Reformation and married Agnes Stirling, who survived him when he died twenty years later ; and John Mure from Binberriyard on the Alloway lands who carried the town's standard at Pinkiecleuch and never came back.
Sometimes we get an account of their lives spread over many years. Barbara Cunningham, born about 1591 and one of the few women whose signature survives, was the daughter of Venice John, merchant, and an excessively pious mother, Margaret McCall. Trapped in a loveless marriage she had been forced into by her parents in her youth, she endured life as a misfit for seventeen years. Intelligent and apparently fond of writing - her statement to the session on her marital problems is lucid and literate - she became rebellious , had an illegitimate child, refused to submit to the authority of the Kirk Session and fled to Ireland. Forbidden on her return to visit her parents and hounded by the session for years, she finally left the town and settled in Leith. She was still there twenty years later in 1657, having sold all the property in Ayr she inherited from her father to Henry Rankine, youngest son of Maggie Osburne. Margaret Osburne, respectable wife of a prosperous merchant and never the witch the folk tales made her out to be, was born about 1584, the daughter of Provost John Osburne and his wife Elizabeth Fergushill and died sometime in the winter of 1647-48. She married John Rankine about 1600 and they had three sons, the eldest of whom must have caused a sensation in the Protestant community of Ayr when he turned Catholic and entered the monastery of Quimper in Brittany as a Capuchin monk. But John Mason, Ayr's town clerk and notary for fifty years was impartial and does no more than state the facts, without comment.
If the tales of Maggie Osburne are no more than myth, an accusation of witchcraft was a terrible reality for twenty eight women in Ayr between 1595 and 1659. Twelve are known to have been burnt, many more probably were and the lives of three can be traced for years, Agnes Campbell, Janet Smeallie, and Janet Sawer. Contrary to popular belief, a woman accused of witchcraft did not have to be old, ugly and living alone with a black cat for company. She was more likely to have an uncontrollable tongue, be at odds with her neighbours, contemptuous of religion ("Kiss the God's arse" said Agnes Campbell when urged "to behave herself more Godly") and have a husband who was anxious to be rid of her.
Janet Sawer "with a seeming willingness submitted herself to death" on the day of her execution, according to an officer of Cromwell's garrison in 1658. She acknowledged her "wicked life" in her address to the crowd, but continued to assert, as she had done throughout her trial, that she knew nothing of witchcraft. She had been young when her first husband died thirty six years before, leaving her well off with a small daughter to support and pregnant again. She had remarried, to John McAdam, notary public and Messenger of Arms, and their relationship seems to have been anything but placid, "continual chiding one with another and he especially for striking and abusing" her. She did not get on well with her neighbours, was often offensive and sarcastic in speech and scornful of the kirk session.
The evidence at her trial, in which things she had said and threats she had uttered twenty years before were quoted verbatim, suggests that someone had been keeping a file on her and building a case for a future trial. Yet some of her neighbours, while admitting that things she had threatened had come to pass, refused to blame her or "could not remember". After her death her husband quickly sold her share in her father's house, married a younger woman and became court dempster in the 1660s. Ayr has long forgotten Janet Sawer but her husband is still reviled on the tombstone of the prisoners of Rullion Green in the Auld Kirk cemetery as "Pontius McAdam". Plague came to Ayr on three occasions, in 1545, for six months in 1606 and for eight weeks in 1647. And also undoubtedly in 1349 when the Black Death struck everywhere, but there are no records from this period. We know little about the outbreak in 1545 except that the Foul Moor was used to isolate the victims exactly as they would be in 1606. There are no figures for the number of victims.
Although 34 people died in the plague of 1647, it does not seem to have been as serious as the better-documented one of 1606 since victims were confined to their homes or to four lodges on the hills built for that purpose. Two attendants visited the lodges each morning, provided the sick with necessities and reported their condition to the magistrates. We know it was carbuncular plague that struck Ayr in 1606 because after it was over James Harper the surgeon had to take seven of his patients to court to recover "money owing to him for curing them, their wives and bairns by God's assistance" of the plague. All had carbuncles, except Robert Fullerton's wife, whom he cured of the "Frinassie" (old French 'frenesie', frenzy, i.e. delirium). The carbuncles are described as "small", "great and dangerous", "pestiferous pest boil" and "the most deadly and dangerous carbuncle ---- called the blue blawer".
The first thing that was done when the plague hit was to close the vennels and ports giving access to the town. Anyone who came after was kept out, even mariners who lived there. Ayr had six ports, one at the Newton side of the bridge, one called the West Port at the end of the present Academy Street, one guarding Sandgate next to St John's Street, one in the Cow Vennel (Alloway Street) and one nearby in Kyle Street. There was another called the Townhead Port built across what is now High Street at the Wallace Tower in 1543 to block entry from Carrick Street and Mill Street, but which is never mentioned in the records, was vacant ground in 1613, yet appears on Tessin's plan of 1654. There is no port mentioned at the Sea Vennel until one was built in 1647 and demolished in 1649, so presumably entry from the harbour was blocked by other means. An entirely new port was built in a more practical position by Cromwell's army. James Stewart, Captain of the King's Guard and for a while Earl of Arran and Chancellor of Scotland, may seem like an intruder in a book about the common people of Ayr but Ayr figures largely in the story of his life as a hunted fugitive and it was from Ayr that he sailed early on a winter's morning when ordered by the king to leave the country. He was the last person to own Newton Castle before it became a Craigie stronghold and it was from here that his wife and family were evicted after a nine hours search "within all the bounds of the burgh of Ayr and in all the houses and places suspect" had failed to find the missing chancellor.
In the early seventeenth century there were 265 houses in Ayr and it has been possible to discover the names of their owners in 1617 and often a good deal about their personal lives. The registers of sasines have also yielded the true position of the Greyfriars monastery and the burgh school, the Kyle Port, the Laich Tolbooth, Trinity Vennel and Carnell's Vennel, Foul Causeway and the Foul Moor, the Spittelbog and the Slatebog, the Wool Market, the Burgh lands and the Blackfriars lands, the history of the Auld Tower and the development of the tolbooth in Sandgate. But not the Auld Tolbooth. Of its history we know nothing. The earliest mention in the surviving records is in 1514 when it was in private hands, if indeed the original building existed by then. Redevelopment at the end of the century suggests that there was a new building on the spot. But new building or not, the name Auld Tolbooth continued to be applied to the site for generations.
Given the amount of information available it is not difficult to visualise Ayr in the time of Burns. The Auld Tower was drawn with the clock and the bell tower installed in 1730, giving an idea of what it may have looked like in an earlier time. There is a drawing of about 1780 looking from the church towards the bridge and the harbour. Another of the tower of St John stripped of its roof. When Burns' poems were published the Tam o' Shanter Inn had been standing for forty years and the houses in New Bridge Street and South Harbour Street were all built in 1788-89, followed by another "Great Tenement" at the Fish Cross, still standing, in 1790. The Auld Brig, of course, was always there, from 1491 at least and photographs exist of the first new bridge featured in Burns' poem "The Twa Brigs".
Photography of the 1870s also played its part in preserving an image of an older Ayr, showing thatched houses and building styles with gable ends to the street which were typical of Ayr in an earlier time. A sixteenth century house with foregallery and turnpike stair and initials of the owners, I.P. and S.K. with the date 1583 above the close was photographed before demolition.
But civic authorities and a sense of history never seemed to go together and it was only by the efforts of far-sighted individuals that the Auld Brig and Loudoun Hall were saved from destruction by an unsympathetic council. But the sixteenth century house of John Purience and his wife Sibella Kennedy in the back of the Isle, and the sixteenth century house of John Cunningham of Milnquarter in the lower part of High Street, still standing in 1939, did not survive the re-development of the modern age.