Innes,

Innes, COSMO, lawyer, antiquary, and historian, was born at Durris, on Deeside, 9th September 1798. His father, formerly the laird of Lenchars, was a scion of the old family of Innes of Innes. Cosmo was educated at the Edinburgh High School, and he graduated both at Glasgow and Oxford. In 1822 he passed as a Scottish advocate, became sheriff of Moray in 1840, and subsequently was appointed clerk to the Second Division of the Court of Session. In 1846 he was elected to the (unpaid) chair of History in the university of Edinburgh. Cosmo Innes is perhaps best known as the author of Scotland in the Middle Ages (1860), and Sketches of Early Scotch History (1861), but he also prepared the first volume of Acts of the Scottish Parliament, and at the time of his death was engaged on an index to the whole series. He was further a most industrious member of the Bannatyne, Maitland, and Spalding Clubs, and edited for them several of the register-books of the old religious houses of Scotland, with other historical documents of great importance. He published a volume of lectures on Legal Antiquities (1872), and was the author of several memoirs, including one of Dean Ramsay. Cosmo Innes died suddenly at Killin, 31st July 1874, in his seventy-sixth year. See the Memoir by his daughter, Mrs Hill Burton (1874).