But there were regions, notably the west Highlands and isles, where the new system penetrated slowly and with difficulty through a mountainous and almost townless land.  The law, and written leases, “came slowly up that way.”

Under David, where his rule extended, society was divided broadly into three classes—­Nobles, Free, Unfree.  All holders of “a Knight’s fee,” or part of one, holding by free service, hereditarily, and by charter, constituted the communitas of the realm (we are to hear 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 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.