The first or mythic part of this statement corresponds with the spurious laws of Malcolm the Second, which thus commence—‘1. King Malcolme gave and distributed all his lands of the realm of Scotland amongst his men; 2. and reserved nathing in propertie to himselfe but the Royale dignitie and the Mute hill in the town of Scone,’[101] and may be disregarded as belonging to the spurious history of Scotland. Whether there ever was a time when it could be said that the king possessed nothing but the Moothill of Scone, and in what sense it could be said that the whole kingdom was divided into thanages, and that the whole lands of the kingdom once belonged to the Crown, is a question that must be determined in the course of this inquiry; but when the old chronicler tells us by what class of persons the Crown lands were actually possessed, and by what species of tenure they held them, he is dealing with matters which still existed in his own day, and the characteristics of which he had every means of ascertaining if they were not perfectly familiar to him, and he gives us a very distinct account of them. He discriminates between three classes of persons as possessing these lands. The lowest class were the _agricolæ_ or husbandmen, the actual cultivators of the soil, who were regarded as yearly tenants, and are, no doubt, the same class with those who are termed _bondi_ and _nativi_ in feudal charters. They were, in the eastern districts, the remains of the old Celtic population. The class next above them consisted of the _liberi_ and _generosi_, who held land either on lease for ten or twenty years, or in liferent renewable for one or two lives. The former were probably equivalent to the _liberi firmarii_ or free farmers, and the latter to the Rentallers or kindly tenants of the feudal holdings. The third class, who held directly of the Crown, were either _milites_ or knights, who held a knight’s fee for military service, or _thani_, who held a thanage, or _principes_ or magnates. And he defines a thanage to be a portion of the land of a province held _ad feodofirmam_,[102] or in feu-farm, the holder of which was subject in payment of an annual ‘census’ or feu-duty. By the _principes_, he probably refers either to the Mormaers or Earls of the old Celtic earldoms, or to the position of the great Celtic vassals in the western districts as chiefs of clans.[103] Fordun was himself connected with the northern counties of Kincardine and Aberdeen, where the older holdings of the thanage still maintained their position in the greatest degree even to his own day. He was a chaplain in the diocese of Aberdeen, and the Chartulary of that bishopric has preserved to us a rental of the Crown lands in the reign of Alexander the Third, which shows their extent and the nature of the holdings. In this rental we find the lands of Aberdeen, Belhelvy, Kintore, Fermartyn, Obyne, Glendowachy, Boyn, Munbre, and Natherdale,