great Council which negotiated the ransom of King David II and the nobles who entered into a hasty consultation with James IV at Twiselhaugh. As English constitutional liberty advanced, phrases borrowed from the English Commons find a place in the Scottish records, but they possess no real significance, and they render more difficult the task of interpreting the Acts. It is only now and again that we can speak with certainty of the membership of Parliament, or of the proportion of burgesses to barons and ecclesiastics. The Acts of the Parliament of Scotland give as little assistance to the historian as it is possible for such documents to yield. Our information certainly becomes less meagre as time goes on. The publications of the Burgh Records Society are important evidence of the state of administration in the most favourable circumstances. The professed histories become more valuable, and from the beginning of the sixteenth century there is a large amount of contemporary description, mainly incidental. Such references must be collected from the works of historians like Boece and Major; from the writings of controversialists like John Knox, George Buchanan, and James VI; from the diaries of private gentlemen, preserved to us by an unusually benignant fate, or from the reports of ambassadors. We owe more to the intelligent curiosity of Pedro de Ayala (the emissary of Ferdinand and Isabella), and of Thomas Randolph (the agent of Elizabeth), than to many more serious sources. But contemporary evidence of this kind must be subjected to rigid scrutiny. The historian of his own times is seldom free from the taint of political prejudice, and the eyes of controversialists are blinded that they cannot see. The simple diarist is not impressed by the even tenour of life; his pen finds an inspiration only in the unusual and the abnormal, and it is difficult for us to discover the rules when we are given only the exceptions, or to keep a true proportion in our mental vision when we can find no standard of comparison. Least of all can we give implicit trust to the political agent, whose motives are uncertain, and who was himself quite likely to mistake the accidental for the normal. Lastly, there are the formal accounts and the figures, facts, and dates which appear in official records; but such evidence is only of subsidiary importance, and, of itself, can rarely give adequate support to any theory.[3]