were handed over, with the lands they tilled, to the abbeys
by benefactors: the Church was forward in emancipating these serfs; nor
were lay landlords backward, for the freed man was useful as a spear-man
in war.

We have only to look at the many now ruined abbeys of the Border to see
the extent of civilisation under David I., and the relatively peaceful
condition, then, of that region which later became the cockpit of the
English wars, and the home of the raiding clans, Scotts, Elliots, and
Armstrongs, Bells, Nixons, Robsons, and Croziers.

THE BURGHS.

David and his son and successor, William the Lion, introduced a stable
middle and urban class by fostering, confirming, and regulating the
rights, privileges, and duties of the already existing free towns. These
became _burghs_, royal, seignorial, or ecclesiastical. In origin the
towns may have been settlements that grew up under the shelter of a
military castle. Their fairs, markets, rights of trading, internal
organisation, and primitive police, were now, mainly under William the
Lion, David's successor, regulated by charters; the burghers obtained the
right to elect their own magistrates, and held their own burgh-courts;
all was done after the English model. As the State had its "good men"
(_probi homines_), who formed its recognised "community," so had the
borough. Not by any means all dwellers in a burgh were free burghers;
these free burghers had to do service in guarding the royal castle--later
this was commuted for a payment in money. Though with power to elect
their own chief magistrate, the burghers commonly took as Provost the
head of some friendly local noble family, in which the office was apt to
become practically hereditary. The noble was the leader and protector of
the town. As to police, the burghers, each in his turn, provided men to
keep watch and ward from curfew bell to cock-crow. Each ward in the town
had its own elected Bailie. Each burgh had exclusive rights of trading
in its area, and of taking toll on merchants coming within its _Octroi_.
An association of four burghs, Berwick, Roxburgh, Edinburgh, and
Stirling, was the root of the existing "Convention of Burghs."

JUSTICE.

In early societies, justice is, in many respects, an affair to be settled
between the kindreds of the plaintiff, so to speak, and the defendant. A
man is wounded, killed, robbed, wronged in any way; his kin retaliate on
the offender and _his_ kin