| Moir v. Harlaw |
28 Jan 1802
|
Feu, Church, Construction |
In the parish of Peterhead, the church had fallen into disrepair. The landowners in Peterhead advocated for building a new church, with expenses for its construction being dispersed across the population of the parish. Renters in the town, or feuars, believed this approach to be unfair given that they would be the ones bearing the majority of the cost of construction. Instead, they claimed that the landowners had decided to build a new church in order to put the financial burden on the feuars. Since the landowners owned the old church exclusively, they would have been responsible for financing all repairs made to it, and so the feuars believed that the landowners purposely pronounced the old church unsafe rather than making repairs to it in order to avoid paying more. Marginalia notes that the case was reversed on June 24, 1802 with the holding that the expense of building a new church in a parish with both heritors and feuars should be divided between them based on their respective populations. |
