DIXON, ALEXANDER [SSNE 5089]
- Surname
- DIXON, DICKSONE, DIKSONE, DICKSON
- First name
- ALEXANDER
- Nationality
- SCOT
- Region
- ABERDEEN
- Social status
- BURGESS
Text source
Alexander Dickson was a Scot from Aberdeen who became a burgess of Cracow in 1599.
In 1599 Alexander Dickson, a trader, provided a birthbrieve dated Aberdeen 28 June 1588, took the oath and paid 20 florins to become a citizen of Cracow. He is probably the same as Alexander Dickson who was meant to marry Sophia Murray (Mora/More) at the end of February 1597. Murray died on the 21st of February however, and the day after her burial her body was found dug up and plundered. The burial clothes were then brought to market and the perpetrators of the crime captured and beheaded before the Town Hall.
Alexander Dickson did eventually marry in 1625 to a Frenchwoman called Justine Dugert. She died in 1633. That year an Alexander Dickson marred Elisabeth Krause but it is not clear whether this was the same man. Mr Dickson's daughter, Magdelene Kesler, died of the plague in 1653.
On 3 March 1651 Alexander Dixon, a well-famed citizen and merchant of Cracow, was at the Town Hall in to defend himself against charges of not paying his tithes. Dixon declared that he was born in Cracow and had lived there for 57 years. He also claimed that as he had no inheritance from his parents he should be free from the tithe. Eventually the case was remitted to the Royal Court for adjudication, but the outcome is not known. This was probably the same man as above. In 1651 he also provided 840 florins for King Charles II.
Sources: A.F. Steuart, Papers relating to the Scots in Poland 1576-1793 (Edinburgh, 1915), p.44, pp.111-112; Lib. Jur. Civ. Crac. 1555-1612, fo.866; A.B. Pernal and R.P. Gasse, 'The 1651 Polish Subsidy to the exiled Charles II', Oxford Slavonic Papers, vol xxxii (Oxford, 1999), p.21, p.34; Cracow Court records, p.82; C. Ozog, "Scottish Merchants in Poland 1550-1750" in Journal of the Sydney Society for Scottish History, vol. 3, (1995), p.65; A. Bieganska, "In search of Tolerance, Scottish Catholics and Presbyterians in Poland", in Scottish Slavonic Review, 17 (1991),p.45; Steve Murdoch, Network North: Scottish Kin, Commercial and Covert Associations in Northern Europe, 1603-1746 (Brill, Leiden, 2006), p.56; Peter Paul Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 16th-18th Centuries, (Leiden, 2012), p.118, n.2.
Service record
- POLAND, CRACOW
- Arrived 1599-01-01
- Capacity BURGESS, purpose CIVIC/MERCANTILE