Such a subject as this must, of necessity, occupy the border between antiquities and history, and it possesses its full share of the difficulties that beset the antiquary more than the historian. The information which it is the antiquary's duty to collect is widely scattered in bounds of space, and is possessed of but a meagre connection in thought. He must be prepared to bring together his material from many different quarters and to find it in many varying forms. Facts that have been preserved because of their local import, and have been buried in local records far from the scene of his interest, rumours and legends that continue to exist in connection with some individual who finds no place in his main theme, casual remarks of accidental observers, inferences deduced from half-forgotten customs and from dying myths, carefully kept records which, either wilfully or by chance, are designed to give a false impression unless read in the light of some apparently irrelevant circumstance--such are the materials on which the antiquary depends. The writer who is bold enough to undertake an investigation into the Scottish Constitution will find the difficulties of the antiquary added to the troubles of the historian. His task is that which, of old, Pharaoh set to the children of Israel--"Go yourselves, get ye straw where ye can ... for there shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks." The student of the English Constitution can point to a body of documentary evidence such as no other nation can produce. What would not the Scottish student give for the _corpus_ of Anglo-Saxon law, the magnificent record of Domesday Book, the Dialogue concerning the Exchequer, and the _Modus Tenendi Parliamentum_? Yet these constitute only a small fraction of the material which now lies ready for the beginner in the study of English history, and he may learn more in a month than years of patient labour will yield to the investigator of the _origines_ of Scottish civilization. The Scottish Constitution began to take shape between the reigns of David I and Alexander III, that is, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the records of these years have been, in large measure, destroyed. The shock of the War of Independence arrested its development, but constitutional movements can again be traced under David II and James I, and for the century which connects their reigns (1329-1437) our information is scattered and meagre. The English historian knows definitely the racial distribution with which he has to deal, and he can disintegrate the influence of Saxon and Dane and Norman. In Scotland, we have to face at the very outset, a racial problem as yet unsolved, and we are called upon to disassociate influences of the origin of which we are ignorant, and whose effects we meet only in the mass.