[1] The later volumes of the Privy Council Register, under the editorship of Professor Masson and Mr. P. Hume Brown, deal with the period immediately before and after the Union of the Crowns, and so do not fall within our subject. [2] On this subject, cf. Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, pp. 226-244. [3] After the Union of the Crowns, the sources of information became very much more numerous, and the subject has been treated with much greater fulness. The work of Professor Masson, Mr. Gardiner, and Mr. Firth on the period between 1603 and 1660 has placed the constitutional history of Scotland for that period in a position quite different from that which it occupies in the centuries preceding the Union. [4] _Opera Geographica et historica_, edition of 1707, p. 318. [5] _Spanish Calendar_, i, 210. [6] _History of English Law_, vol. i, pp. 222-224 (1st edn., pp. 201-203). [7] Cf. Pitscottie's _Chronicles of Scotland_, vol. ii, p. 477. Scottish Text Soc. Edn., ed. Aeneas Mackay. Sheriff Mackay's notes are specially valuable from the legal stand-point, and his edition gives a new importance to Pitscottie's work. [8] Cf. Hill Burton's Introduction to the Privy Council Register, vol. ii. [9] Baron Hume, quoted in Renton's _Encyclopaedia of the Laws of England_, vol. xi, p. 402. [10] _History of King James the Sext_, p. 88 (Bannatyne Club ed.). [11] _Diurnal of Occurrents in Scotland_, p. 76 (Bannatyne Club). [12] Aikman, _Buchanan_, i. 437. Buchanan is the source of the whole constitutional myth. The second founder of the legend was George Ridpath, who published, anonymously, in 1703, _An Historical Account of the Ancient Rights and Power of the Parliament of Scotland_. This brilliant and ingenious political tract is based on Buchanan, who is always the real, and frequently the avowed, authority for Ridpath's view; and by Ridpath, in turn, many more recent writers have been influenced. [13] Innes, _Critical Essay_, i. 361-95. [14] For a typical instance of this cf. Boece, _Lives of the Bishops of Aberdeen_ (New Spalding Club ed.), pp. 112-13.