Conclusion

This slow change in the courts of law in the later fifteenth century was symptomatic of a process of transformation also under way elsewhere in the system and traditions of Scottish governance. James IV would be the last king of Scots to be crowned at Scone;5 parliaments were scarcely held after 1496; and justice ayres ceased to take place on the old pattern after 1513. The great provincial earldoms, derived from the kingdom of Alba, had become little more than honorific titles. Yet this process of change had by no means stripped the kingdom of the institutional, political and legal characteristics with which it had been imbued since the days of David I. Indeed, for much of the four centuries discussed in this chapter the dominant theme must be one of continuity; continuity, moreover, in the face of deep stresses and strains arising from vigorous and sustained external pressures and the accidents of inheritance and

War.  The system depended fundamentally upon interactions between king and nobility within a framework of institutions and law capable of surviving shocks such as foreign conquest, uncertainty about the royal succession, the prolonged loss of captive kings, and numerous royal minorities stretching back to the accession of Malcolm IV in 1153. It was not a comprehensive system of government: absolute control of the north and west was beyond the powers of the medieval kingdom, just as England could never gain more than a foothold in the Scottish borders. The lesser reach of government in the highlands was perhaps accentuated by a growing perception of a cultural difference between them and the lands of the south and east. It

Was,  however, truly a case of a lesser reach rather than one of no reach at all. In 1500 the kingdom of the Scots did indeed extend from just north of Berwick to the Shetland isles, embracing a region the geography, language and culture of which was indeed diverse but whose essential political unity was to survive, vigorously, down to the present day.