After this we hear no more of the seven earls of Scotland. As a constitutional body possessing, or claiming to possess, separate privileges, they are merged in the general ‘Communitas regni,’ or Estates of the kingdom, the feudal ‘Curia regis’ consisting of all who held lands in chief of the Crown. As we have seen, when the succession to the Crown was settled towards the end of the reign of Alexander the Third, they take no part as a separate body, but are merged in the general assembly of the feudal baronage of the kingdom, consisting of thirteen earls and twenty-four barons, and six years afterwards there is a still fuller representation of the Estates of the kingdom, when a letter is addressed to Edward the First by the Communitas regni urging him to arrange a marriage of his son with the Maid of Norway. The body from whom this letter proceeds consists of the two bishops of St. Andrews and Glasgow, John Cumyn, and James, High Steward, the guardians of the kingdom; ten diocesan bishops; twelve of the thirteen earls, the earl of Fife being then a minor; twenty-three abbots of monasteries, eleven priors, and forty-eight barons holding of the Crown.[98] Neither do they appear as a separate body in the great national protest addressed by the Communitas regni to the Pope in 1320, and signed on their behalf by eight of the earls and twenty-eight of the barons.[99] [Sidenote: State of the land in the reign of Alexander the Third.] The state, then, of the land, as thus exhibited to us in the reign of Alexander the Third, appears to have been this.—A large portion of the territory of the kingdom was now held in chief of the Crown by barons, very few of whom were of Celtic descent, on the feudal tenure of military service. Another portion of the territory formed the domain of the Crown. A third portion formed the territory possessed by the old earls of Scotland, and presented, in miniature, the same characteristics as the Crown land, being partly held of the earls by the vassals of the earldom, and partly forming his domain; and a very large extent of territory, probably not less than a third of the whole land, belonged to the Church, and formed the possessions either of the bishoprics, or of the great monasteries which had been founded by the kings of this dynasty, while the lands which had formed the territory of the old Celtic monasteries and had become secularised, now appear either in the possession of the Crown or of the monasteries under the name of ‘abthaniæ’ or abthainries.