In that part of Scotland which still retained, in the main, a Celtic population, we may expect to find the Celtic tenures still prevailing to a large extent, and still exhibiting many of their peculiar characteristics; but where the population had become in a large measure Teutonic, and where so much of the land was now held on feudal tenures by the great barons of the Crown, and by the Roman monastic orders, and where so many of the earldoms had passed by marriage into Norman families, it is more difficult to discover the traces of a Celtic occupation, and the peculiarities of the Celtic tenures under the feudal forms which shrouded them from observation. These we can only expect to find on that portion of land which formed the proper demesne of the Crown and of the old earls, and had been retained in their own possessions without the interposition of any feudal vassals between them and the actual occupiers of the soil. [Sidenote: The Crown demesne.] Of the mode in which the demesne land of the Crown was actually possessed, we have fortunately a very distinct account given to us by the old chronicler, John of Fordun. He refers it back to the period of Malcolm the Second, to whom nine spurious laws have been attributed, and supposes it to have originated with him; but this may be regarded as a mere theory, framed on the basis of the spurious history of Scotland, to account for a state of matters which existed in his own day, and we have only to separate the mythic part of his statement from what is obviously the result of his own observation. He tells us that ‘histories relate the aforesaid Malcolm to have been so open-handed, or rather prodigal, that while, according to ancient custom, he held as his own property all the lands, districts, and provinces of the whole kingdom, he kept nothing thereof in his possession but the Moothill of the royal seat of Scone, where the kings, sitting in their royal robes on the throne, are wont to give out judgments, laws, and statutes to their subjects. Of old, indeed, the kings were accustomed to grant to their soldiers in feu-farm more or less of their own lands, a portion of any province, or a thanage; for at that time almost the whole kingdom was divided into thanages. Of these he granted to each one as much as he pleased, either on lease by the year as tillers of the ground, or for ten or twenty years, or in liferent, with remainder to one or two heirs, as free and kindly tenants, and to some likewise, though few, in perpetuity, as knights, thanes, and chiefs, not however so freely, but that each of them paid a certain annual feu-duty to their lord the king,’[100]