 and Michaelmas 1512; and failing their doing so, to pay £40 to the common works of the town, and also to pay £5 for every acre of three acres of the Common Muir set to them".The Scottish lawyer and antiquarian William Moir Bryce (whose exhaustive researches inform much of this article), writing in an age influenced by the Temperance Movement, thought this a "strange obligation", but it made sense at a time before piped urban water supplies, when beer was the common drink in preference to water drawn from lochs and wells which often proved injurious to health.The feuing of the Muir led to the rapid clearing of the remaining woodland on the muir, to dispose of which more easily the Council granted anyone fronting their tenement with wood the liberty of extending the front by seven feet into the street.