t periodically over all the kingdom, and--appealing
still more strongly to the imagination--a king that shut his ears to no
petition and interfered with a strong hand to right the wronged, began a
new era for the commonalty of Scotland. Even the unfavourable
description so often quoted of Eneas Silvius, reports the common people
as having "abundance of flesh and fish," no small ingredient of
wellbeing, and records rather a complete absence of luxuries than that
want which reduces the vital strength of a nation. The same authority
tells of exportations of "hides, wool, salt fish, and pearls," the
latter a curious item, although there were as yet no manufactures, and
even such necessaries as horse-shoes and every kind of harness had to be
imported from Flanders. But the Scots in their farmhouses and cottages
made the cloth with which they were clothed, and their "blew caps," the
well-known blue bonnet which has lasted to our own days. And they
retained the right which, according to her monkish chronicler, St.
Margaret had been the first to secure for them--of immunity from all
military requisitions, and even, which is a curious contradiction of the
supposed tyrannies of the nobles, held an absolute property in their own
goods which out of the island of Great Britain no peasantry in the world
possessed. The French allies who were in Scotland in the end of the
fourteenth century were struck with angry consternation to hear
themselves hailed by a set of clodhoppers, and bidden to keep the paths
and not trample down the growing corn, and to find that, however willing
the Scots men-at-arms might be to harry England when occasion offered,
not the greatest lord in the French contingent could carry off a cow or
a brace of pullets without compensation. We cannot but think that the
country in which the peasant's barnyard was thus defended was at least
as forward in the best elements of civilisation as those in which there
were hangings of arras and trenches of silver, but no security for
anything in homesteads or workshop which might be coveted by the
seigneur.

[Illustration: HOLYROOD]

Edinburgh, as has been said, never seems to have been a favourite
habitation of this enlightened and accomplished Prince. Perhaps Queen
Jane found the east winds too keen on the heights, or the Abbey of the
Holy Rood too low in the valley. The heir was born there it is true, and
we have note of various Parliaments and visits, but no settled reside