hered her children and fled to
Edinburgh Castle to put the little heir of the kingdom, now James II, in
security. The hapless child was sadly crowned at Holyrood at six years
old, with a hastily adapted ceremonial, the first of many such
disastrous rites to come.

The time of James's reign had been one of rising prosperity throughout
the realm. Law and order had been established in recognised courts and
tribunals, the titles of property had been ascertained and secured, not
without loss, no doubt, to many arrogant lords who had seized upon stray
land without any lawful title, or on whom it had been illegally bestowed
during the Albany reign--but to the general confidence and safety. And
the condition of the people had no doubt improved in consequence. It is
difficult to form any estimate of what this condition was. All foreign
witnesses give testimony of an unpleasing kind, and represent the
country as wretched, squalid, and uncivilised: but on the other hand
nothing can be more unlike this report than the most valuable and
unintentional evidence furnished by King James's own poems, with their
tale of village merry-makings and frays which convey no impression of
abject poverty, nor even of that rudest level of life where material
wants are so pressing as to exclude all lighter thoughts. "On Mayday,"
says King James, "when everybody is bound to Peblis to the play,"

"At Beltane quhan ilke bodie bownis
To Peblis to the play,
To heir the singing and sweit soundis,
The solace suth to say.
Be firth and forest furth they found,
They graythit them full gay;
God wot that wald they do that stound,
For it was thair feist day
They said
Of Peblis to the Play."

All the lasses of the west, he goes on to tell us, were up at cockcrow,
and no men might rest for the chatter and the noise of their
preparations. One cried that her curch was not starched enough, another
that a hood was best, another bewailed herself as "so evil sunburnt"
that she was not fit to be seen. The young folk stream along "full bold"
with the bagpipes blowing, and every village adding its contingent, "he
before and she before to see which was most gay."

"Some said that they were mercat folk,
Some said the Quene of May
Was cumit
Of Peblis to the Play."

When they arrive at the "taverne hous" they give orders that the board
be