The burghs had risen in population and importance, generally clustering round the larger religious houses. Men not connected with the land either as proprietors or retainers, congregated together for mutual trade and mutual protection. The sovereigns encouraged this growth, as affording a readier means of raising revenue, and as an equipoise to the power of the nobles; granting the towns chartered privileges, which constituted them royal burghs. The citizens elected their municipal Council; the chief magistrate was styled Provost, the others Bailies. Many burghs were defended by walling, and the citizens were trained to arms; they had to defend the burgh, and, in levies, to help the King in his wars. In the midland shires law and order obtained generally, but in the Highlands and their adjacent islands, and in the frontier shires, there was, as a rule, lawlessness and disorder. The halo of romance, largely kindled by the genius of Sir Walter Scott, hovers round the Scottish Highlands. The “Land of green heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood” bred a stalwart race of brave men, with persistent loyalty in their hearts to their clanship, and to the hills and glens which were to them their fatherland; but they long continued in semi-barbarism, separated by race and language from the comparatively civilized Lowlands, with little of national patriotism, and a great distrust of the—to them distant—sovereignty of Holyrood. They often, as did their forefathers in the time of the Romans, a thousand years previously, made plundering incursions into the Lowlands; but they had continual clan-quarrels amongst themselves, which helped to keep them in their native wilds, and the government would foment these quarrels, and even, to their mutual destruction, employ one clan against another. So late as the reign of James IV. an Act of Parliament, for the better government of the Highlands and Islands, states that for want of justices and sheriffs, these districts had become almost savage. And the border counties—on both sides of the hardly defined line of demarcation—were also in an unsettled state. They, too, had their family clanships, their hereditary feuds, their predatory raids. There was a sort of debatable land of moor, forest, and morass, where neither national nor forest-law was paramount. On both sides Wardens of the marches were appointed, with a mutual understanding to prevent border- raiding. But the Wardens themselves were generally heads of the great neighbouring families, and they often broke their own laws, by sheltering or encouraging offenders. Altogether the picture which we gather from the history of Scotland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is not a pleasant one to dwell upon.