Scotland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries still retained many of the features of a confederated rather than of a consolidated kingdom, acknowledging indeed, even in the earlier portion of that period, the rule of one reigning family, but scarcely recognising the authority of the same laws and customs, or bound together by the ties of kindred, origin, and language. Between Forth and Tweed lay Lothian, bordering towards the western frontiers upon the Cumbrian principality and Galloway; both the former provinces having been annexed to the Scottish crown by a course of successful aggression, if not by actual conquest, though Galloway was still rather a tributary dependency than an integral portion of the kingdom. Lothian, apparently, preserved the same laws that were in force throughout Saxon Northumbria before the reign of Canute; whilst two centuries of the dominion of a Scottish line of princes over Cumbria must have introduced a Scottish proprietary very generally throughout the province, without effecting any material alteration in laws and customs, which, based upon the Celtic principle of government, differed probably little, if at all, from the code then and long afterwards retained in Galloway. Northward of the Scots-water two great divisions were recognised, _Scotia_, or Scotland proper, and _Moravia_. The former embraced the whole of the Lowland districts from the Spey to the Forth, extending to the summit of the _Mounth_ or Grampian range; thus including the earldoms of Mar, Buchan, and Angus, Fife, Atholl, Strathearn, and Menteith, with Gowrie and Stormont, the Merns and other districts retained more directly in the king’s hands; together with the whole of “Scottish Argyle,” which, before the creation of the shire and bishopric, was connected with Atholl and the Abbacy of Glendochart; whilst Cantyre and Cowal depended upon the earldom of Menteith. _Moravia_ was made up of the earldoms of Moray, forfeited in the earlier portion of David’s reign; Caithness, which still included Sutherland, then extending as far as Dingwall; and Ross, a sort of debatable land between the _Gall-Gael_, _Oirir-Gael_, and ancient Mormaors of Moray: with “Northern Argyle,” or that portion of the territories of the _Oirir-Gael_ which reached, at this period, from the northern boundaries of the modern county to the frontiers of the _Gall-Gael_ in Sutherland.[270] Feudal tenure, in the later Anglo-Norman acceptation of the word, was unknown throughout these provinces at the accession of Alexander the First; though the earlier system of government, once existing amongst a number of independent tribes and confederacies, had long given place to the royal authority wherever the rights of the crown--as was certainly the case in _Scotia_--were thoroughly established. But though the principle of the system was changed, the features remained very much the same; and a nobility, owing their original appointment or confirmation to the