he becomes more impatient of the society to the West and North, disorderly no doubt, always represented by the Scottish historian as the essence of turbulence, but in reality not any more if as much so as the nobles of the Lowlands, who in each reign kidnapped, fought, and murdered their kings.

When David II. came back from France in 1369 after his long stay in feudal England, he made a raid into the Highlands, and his independent neighbour John of the Isles met him at Inverness. They made a treaty which John's following ignored. Fifteen years later, in the reign of Robert II., an Act was passed to suppress Highland Katherani,3 like most mediæval Acts of Parliament a pious wish.

Five years later yet, in 1389, so little progress had been made that in the truce between France, England, and their allies, the King of Scots is stated to be the ally of the King of France, and the Lord of the Isles the ally of the King of England.

In 1411 a test of strength between the two sections, feudal and communal, took place. Alexander, the Wolf of Badenoch, Duke of Albany, the brother of Robert II., was the king's lieutenant over Scotland north of the Forth. He claimed the earldom of Ross, Scotland north of the Moray Firth, in right of his late wife, Euphemia, the widow of the Earl of Ross. In her lifetime, as a great Highland chief, he had acted in full conformity with custom, defied the church over a dispute about lands with the Bishop of Moray, and being excommunicated had brought a Highland army to Elgin and burnt the cathedral. This Earl had a bastard son who followed in his footsteps, and made frequent raids for plunder into the Lowlands, in one of which he stormed the castle of Kildrummy on the Don, and carried off the Countess of Mar. She married him, and he, becoming a feudal Earl of Mar, changed methods, became respectable, and asserted his feudal rights over the West.

When the younger Euphemia, Countess of Ross, went into a convent and brought the line of the Earldom of Ross to an end, Donald, Lord of the Isles, who had married her aunt Margaret, claimed it and prepared to enforce his claim.

The Duke of Albany sends a message to Donald telling

him that if he wants Ross he must fight for it, and Donald replies by bringing a large army of Highlanders to occupy Ross. He sets out to burn Aberdeen, and overruns and ravages all Moray. Then he moves along the ridge of the Grampians to Harlaw, while the Earl of Mar, with a small disciplined force of armoured men, waits for him in the plain below. Donald's army descends upon him, but the rushes of the waves of Highlanders, fighting independently, as Tacitus gives it to us in their families and clans, make small impression on the feudal force in armour. After an all-day fight, Donald retires to the Highlands, and the Earl of Mar takes possession.

James I.-The independence of the West and North was the more complete because for several centuries Scotland suffered terribly from minor kings. One boy after another ascended a rocking throne only, to be kidnapped and bullied by the great heads of families in their several interests, and on attaining his majority to turn his back on all that had been done in his infancy, to effect a general gaol delivery to the block of heads of houses and their adherents, and possibly to make a big raid into the West or South to show his strength. With the accession of the first James of the Stuart line the conditions as regarded the people of the West underwent a change. The younger son of Robert II. was sent as a child, in 1405, to France for safety. But on his way he was captured by an English ship, and he remained for nearly twenty years a prisoner in England, where he fell in love with and married Jane Beaumont, daughter of the Earl of Somerset, the brother of Henry IV. In 1424 he was released on payment of £30,000, came north, a poet and most probably a philosopher, and was crowned at Scone.

In his exile he had learnt to conform himself to the English system. With the first James comes to Scotland the full flood of feudalism. He legislates. He sets forth laws in Scots tongue, while the English were still using NormanFrench. He orders Quo Warranto in Scotland; holders of baronies and lands must show their titles He makes the usual butchery of his uncle's sons, his cousins; acts which if they had been done by Highlanders or Irish would have been cited as conclusive proof of their barbarism.

Three years after his coronation he called a Parliament at Aberdeen, and summoned to it the Lord of the Isles with a number of Highland and Island chiefs. They were foolish enough to trust to his honour, came, were seized, imprisoned, and for the most part murdered. In spite of the loss of their leaders by this seizure, the men of the West were able to continue their raids on the arable lands of the South, making the usual pretence of submission when James threatened an expedition.

But the Highlanders were not the only ones who resented the extension of kingly feudalism. A conspiracy of great nobles was formed against James, and in 1437 he was murdered at Perth, his death being marked by the devotion of a woman, Margaret Douglas, who put her arm through the bars of the door from which the bolt had been withdrawn in order to give the king time to escape.

James II.-Another minor king gives the call for the usual kidnapping and rebellion. After a long struggle with independent nobles, James II. invites Douglas to Stirling, and murders him with his own hand.

What follows must be read in Scottish history. It is a story of civil war between a treacherous king and a house that knew no submission; of barons and great men who broke their oaths and shifted from one side to the other as it suited their advantage; of changes of the balance of power by opportune marriages (as when Douglas marries his brother's widow); of all those shiftings and changes which, if they had been the result of tribal wars, would have been the text for the exhortation by the historian on the incapacity of the tribes to show a united front to the enemy.

In 1460, when he was besieging Roxburgh, James II. was killed by the bursting of a cannon, and was succeeded by James III., aged eight years.

The Lord of the Isles had assisted James II. at the siege of Roxburgh, but, on his death, he invaded the Orkneys with a great force, and sent his son Angus Og with a levy of men of the Isles and Highlands to raid Inverness. He was proclaimed King of the Isles, and he claimed to rule over Inverness, Sutherland, Caithness, and Ross.

This raid was apparently in consequence of a secret treaty with Edward IV., then at the height of his power. He secretly proposed a partition of Scotland between the lords with whom he was treating, the Lord of the Isles to hold all north of the Forth, and Douglas all south, as his feudal tenants. Henry VI. and Queen Margaret had about this time fled to Scotland. No notice was taken of this secret treaty during the king's minority, but in 1474 it was discovered, and the Lord of the Isles was cited to appear before Parliament. As a result he gave up the Earldom of Ross and the sheriffdoms of Inverness and Nairn. But he was evidently in a very strong position, for he was created a feudal baron as Lord of the Isles, and the patent was taken to his bastard as well as his legitimate sons.

Another step in the amalgamation of Scotland was taken by this King of Scots. He married Margaret, the daughter of Christian, King of Norway. For her dowry King Christian gave up all claim to the Western Isles and mortgaged the Orkneys and Shetland to the Scottish king, a mortgage which has never been redeemed.

James IV.-In 1488 James III. came to the normal end. He was murdered, and James IV., a minor, when he reached full age, made, like his predecessors, an overturn of all acts done during his minority. In 1493 he went in force to the Isles, and there received the usual submission and homage of the chiefs. James was probably aware that this was an empty form, for he was not content with this, but set out to reorganise the government and to subvert the customary law of the islesmen. He gave the control of the Isles to the Earl of Argyll as lieutenant, and he made great efforts to divide the chiefs by raising causes of quarrel. His efforts in this respect were in vain. Angus Og, the son of John Lord of the Isles who had helped James II. at the siege of Roxburgh, had been killed in 1485, but he left a pregnant wife, who was captured and taken care of by her father, the Earl of Argyll. Her child, Donald Dubh, or the Black, escaped in 1501 from the custody of the earl, and took the position as leader of the chiefs in the Isles. Failing to divide the chiefs, James prepared a great naval force to reduce them, and, by an Act of Parliament in 1503, he appointed justices for the Isles to

administer feudal law, dividing the Isles into two judiciary parts-north and south.

The Earl of Huntly, who had been made sheriff of Inverness, was told to "plant " all lands occupied by broken men-that is, men who had no chief responsible for them; which would look as if the communal system was breaking up in the isolation caused by the insular form. That the king should take charge of the lands of a headless tribe, of men who had no one to answer for their acts, was a step quite in accordance with the Brehon law, and in fact all medieval law, which demanded that every member of the community should be represented by a responsible head. Every man without a chief to the king (supra, p. 173). The earl was to let their lands on a five years' lease to tenants who should be true men. The result of all this was a three years' war in the West, which only ended in 1506 by the taking of Stornoway and the capture of Donald Dubh. The North Isles were then put under the Earl of Huntly, and the South under the Earl of Argyll.

James V.-In 1513 James IV., who had married ten years previously Margaret of England, was killed at Flodden, leaving James V., a minor.

Then followed a period during which the Scots king wavered between the Earl of Argyll as lieutenant for the Crown and the chiefs of the Isles as his agents, and formed coalitions with the Irish chiefs against Henry VIII., who in his turn plotted with the chiefs of the West and with Argyll.

In 1540 James sailed by way of the Orkneys to the Isles and took hostages from the chiefs, but later, during that worst of all Henry's treacherous actions towards Scotland, the raid of 1545,4 the men of the Isles and the Highlands from the West under Donald Dubh, who had been released, attacked the Scots.

Queen Mary.-In 1542 Mary Queen of Scots was born and James V. died. With the reign of Mary Queen of Scots came the Reformation movement, which had so long been preparing, and the bitterness of its differences for the time swallowed up all other matters. But by 1603, when James VI. of the Reformed Church of Scotland united under his rule for the first time the whole of the Islands, all the salt had gone out of the religious disputes.