Sheriffs (Scotland) Act 1747
United Kingdom legislation
The Sheriffs (Scotland) Act 1747 (21 Geo. 2. c. 19) was an act of the Parliament of Great Britain which applied only to Scotland.
Section 1 of the act provided that anyone who was prosecuted on or after 1 April 1748 for treason or misprision of treason could be tried anywhere in Scotland if the crime had been committed in any of the shires of Dunbartain, Stirling, Perth, Kincardine, Aberdeen, Inverness, Nairn, Cromarty, Argyll, Forfarshire, Banff, Sutherland, Caithness, Elgine, Ross, and Orkney. Normally a crime had to be tried in the shire where it had been committed.
Section 2 of the provided that in such a trial, the jurors could come from adjoining counties, instead of (as would otherwise be the case) the county where the trial was held.
Section 3 of the act also provided that His Majesty's Advocate could move the trial to the High Court of Justiciary.
Section 4 of the act that peers had the right to be tried by their peers.
Section 5 of the act provided that sections 1 to 5 of the act expired after seven years, but were later revived again for another seven years in 1760 by the Treason, etc.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7836634. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1747, 1748 and 1760.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sheriffs (Scotland) Act 1747” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.