Janet Fockart

Merchant and money-lender.

Daughter of Elizabeth Ker, and John Fockart, Edinburgh burgess.

Janet Fockart was a well-known figure in the trading community of Edinburgh. She and her first husband, merchant John Todd, had one son. Her second marriage to prosperous merchant William Fowler (d. 1572) by April 1561, produced three sons and three daughters, including William merchant, William poet in the court circle of James VI, and Susannah, who became the mother of the poet William Drummond of Hawthornden. Her third husband, merchant James Hathoway committed suicide in 1579. They had no children.

Janet Fockart was left to bring up her seven children and run the family business. In company with other merchants she made trading contracts, once with the Earl of Orkney for produce from his lands in return for a loan. She took bonds as security for payment, which she had done in her own name during William Fowler's lifetime, and received income from letting lodgings. Her payment receipts, in her bold handwriting, survive in various family papers. She went to court personally in pursuit of debtors. From the mid-1580s, she turned to outright money-lending, taking pledges of jewellery and other valuables as security for loans. Her clients included nobility, lairds and the professions, to some of whom she lent as much as £1,000 Scots. She lent to the government, and on one occasion the Court of Exchequer met in her house.

Family relations were not always harmonious. Her son-in-law John Drummond took her to court for failure to pay his wife's tocher (dowry), and her merchant son, William, sued her for allowing the family's property in Fowler's (now Anchor) Close to fall into disrepair. When the Fowler family sought a birth-brieve in the mid-17th century they intentionally or erroneously cut her name out of their genealogy, substituting that of Janet Fisher, Englishwoman. They may not have liked the idea of a money-lender, or wadwife, in their ancestry but they must have benefited from her enterprise. On her death she left moveable estate worth over £22,000 Scots, which despite a quarter-century of inflation was still considerably more than that left.