the precise nature of the threat implied in the warning that a man who neglected the king's ordinances should lose his court for evermore? All these are as uncertain as are the powers of the Executive, the administration of justice, the police-system outside the towns, or the arrangements for national defence. Even in the centuries of our separate history which are most fully known, the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth, we are beset by many of the same problems and by others not less obscure. How far was constitutional development in Scotland affected by the short-lived union under Edward I? How far by the three hundred years of alliance with France? Can we infer any connection between the German Diet and the Scottish Estates, between the Lords of the Articles and the Committee by which Richard II attempted to supersede the English Parliament? What is the explanation of the relative position of the Estates of Scotland, and of their seemingly capricious periods of importance under David II and Robert II? Questions like these, to which no answer has yet been attempted, await the student of Scottish institutions, along with the usual problems of finance and justice, the Church, the Crown, and the Legislature. The present Essay is an attempt to deal, in outline, with a single aspect of this constitutional problem. It is the part of the subject on which most evidence is available, and yet the limits of evidence are such as to render many of the difficulties incapable of solution. Almost our only sources for the earlier period are formal charters and incidental references by chroniclers. The scribes who drew up the formal documents were not concerned with the actual circumstances which had produced these deeds; it was their duty to follow the recognized rules of Diplomatic, rules which had originated in foreign Chanceries and which bore the impress of a different civilization. The technical terms in which they abound are not of Scottish origin, and are frequently used to describe conditions to which, in reality, they are totally inapplicable.[2] The historians often belong to an era much later than that of which they write, and they apply, to questions dealing with origins, the phraseology of a relatively late stage of development. When the records of the Acts of Parliament begin, in the twelfth century, they yield us only incidental enactments mainly relating to police methods, and, as they become more numerous, they retain their characteristic of dealing, almost exclusively, with administrative detail. We possess no writs summoning a Parliament, no report of a debate in the Scottish Estates. The constitution of a valid Parliament, the procedure necessary for prorogation and dissolution, the rights of the burgess members, were never definitely decided. The "three Estates" was a technical term having a different meaning at different times, and the word Parliament was applied to bodies so diverse as the