Letter: Letters: Raw Scots

From R. V. JONES

Paul G. Bahn reports that concrete evidence for cannibalism is ‘still
proving hard to find’, (‘Is cannibalism too much to swallow?’, 27 April).

The late Alexander Keith in A Thousand Years of Aberdeen (Aberdeen University
Press, 1972) recorded that in the 15th century Sir Robert Melville of Glenbervie,
Sheriff of the Mearns, ‘was caught by his enemies and boiled to death in
a cauldron. ‘Sodden and suppit in broo (broth)’ was the technical term for
a popular form of lynching in Scotland, for the participants partook of
the soup boiled out of their victims.’

In a footnote Keith added that ‘at least one other instance of this
highly utilitarian method of liquidating obnoxious citizens has been recorded
in Scotland’, the victim being the Laird of Liddesdale in the Borders.

‘A raw Scot’ may thus have culinary as well as cultural overtones.

R. V. Jones Aberdeen, Scotland