Testificate

Pronunciation varies by accent · noun

Meaning

(historical, Scotland) A certificate of good character that was required to allow travel between parishes in the 18th and early 19th centuries..

Example Sentences

The statutory part is, " that no tenant or servant be received without testificate of their carriage, agreeable to the bond annexed," upon the pain of arbitrary punishment ;

...and the same day a proclamation was issued, requiring all heritors, and in their absence, their factors and chamberlains, to convocate all the inhabitants on their lands, and to bring them before any of the privy councillors or commissioners appointed by the counil, and cause them to swear the abjuration-oath, and receive a testificate to serve as a free pass, without which any person who should adventure to travel should be holden and used as a communer with the said execrable rebels ;

Roger Hastie, parochiner of Keithe, compeired, desireing mariage of a woman in the forsaid parishe, and being demanded concerning a testificate from Irland, quher he had resided of late, as he alleadged, answered ingenuouslie that he had brought none over with him from thence, being forced to omitt it throghe the troubles of the countrie, but was able to give his oathe, and qualifie otherwise, that he was nether maried as yet, nor scandelous in his cariage in the place quher he had liued.

... there seems no reason why a certificate should not have been written and signed by the same person but, in any event, the woman who presented it was ordered to leave the parish, a decision which may have had something to do with the fact that she was presenting a child for baptism on her own, the father being dead according to the testificate and so there was no one to support mother and child apart from kirk funds.

In the eighteenth century there was a system of interparish testificates that was very similar to the internal passport system imposed upon serfs in Czarist Russia up to the late nineteenth century.

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