ear of the
_communitas_ later), and were free, noble, or gentle,--men of coat
armour. The "ignoble," "not noble," men with no charter from the Crown,
or Earl, Thane, or Church, were, if lease-holders, though not "noble,"
still "free." Beneath them were the "unfree" _nativi_, sold or given
with the soil.

The old Celtic landholders were not expropriated, as a rule, except where
Celtic risings, in Galloway and Moray, were put down, and the lands were
left in the King's hands. Often, when we find territorial surnames of
families, "_de_" "of" this place or that,--the lords are really of Celtic
blood with Celtic names; disguised under territorial titles; and finally
disused. But in Galloway and Ayrshire the ruling Celtic name, Kennedy,
remains Celtic, while the true Highlands of the west and northwest
retained their native magnates. Thus the Anglicisation, except in very
rebellious regions, was gradual. There was much less expropriation of
the Celt than disguising of the Celt under new family names and
regulation of the Celt under written charters and leases.

CHURCH LANDS.

David I. was, according to James VI., nearly five centuries later, "a
sair saint for the Crown." He gave Crown-lands in the southern lowlands
to the religious orders with their priories and abbeys; for example,
Holyrood, Melrose, Jedburgh, Kelso, and Dryburgh--centres of learning and
art and of skilled agriculture. Probably the best service of the regular
clergy to the State was its orderliness and attention to agriculture, for
the monasteries did not, as in England, produce many careful chroniclers
and historians.

Each abbey had its lands divided into baronies, captained by a lay
"Church baron" to lead its levies in war. The civil centre of the barony
was the great farm or grange, with its mill, for in the thirteenth
century the Lowlands had water-mills which to the west Highlands were
scarcely known in 1745, when the Highland husbandmen were still using the
primitive hand-quern of two circular stones. Near the mill was a hamlet
of some forty cottages; each head of a family had a holding of eight or
nine acres and pasturage for two cows, and paid a small money rent and
many arduous services to the Abbey.

The tenure of these cottars was, and under lay landlords long remained,
extremely precarious; but the tenure of the "bonnet laird" (_hosbernus_)
was hereditary. Below even the free cottars were the unfree serfs or
_nativi_, who