The sesquicentenary of a university is an occasion for reflection. If the Queen's University of Belfast is an international and outward-looking university, it is also one with close links to its local community. In this, of course, it is scarcely unusual. Universities live in a symbiotic relationship with the towns and cities in which they are located: and, despite nineteenth-century dreams of academic pastoral, universities in the main are urban institutions. If there have been some recent advances, much scholarship on the history of universities has yet to take this fully into account. It is important to grasp, however, that the location of a university determines much of its institutional character. If the self-conscious “College Gothic”, common on so many American campuses, or the style of the Lanyon Building at Queen's says something about the intellectual aspirations of institutions, localities also influence architecture and determine the spaces in which academic life is acted out. Correspondingly, a major university may also have a significant impact on even a large city, as, for example, the major employer or the creator of large, dominating buildings. The complex relationship of towns and universities also affects intellectual life. Thus the development of an academic discipline can be enhanced or retarded by the politics of its locality. The development of knowledge and disciplines in any institution is subject to many contingencies.

One feature of this interdependency of knowledge and locality is the mutual relationship between universities and the local professions they have often served. This interdependency and mutual influence is made more complex by the relationships local universities and professions have with wider constituencies. This paper is the first of two exploring this huge topic through a study of the development of law teaching and professional education in the universities and town of Aberdeen in the era of the Scottish Enlightenment, taking this to run roughly, if somewhat generously, from 1680 to 1830. Roger Emerson has already argued that the size and institutional complexity of a town can determine the nature of its individual enlightenment. Aberdeen is particularly interesting in this context. It had two universities: King's College and University (founded 1495) in the burgh of Old Aberdeen, and Marischal College and University (founded 1593) in the royal burgh of Aberdeen itself.