50 Transactions. 



trade and commerce, with which the treasury was i-eplenished. 

 JBut no king of Scotland ever stood in the same relationship to its 

 soil as Norman William did to that of England. Had Edward I. 

 subdued North Britain, he might have divided the land among his 

 followers and placed Scotland on the same footing as England in 

 regard to the feudal system. As, however, the Scottish soil never 

 became the property by conquest of any foreign prince, and was 

 never more than nominally the property of its own kings, the 

 revenue it yielded to the Crown was precarious, and generally 

 speaking small as compared with the land revenue of England. 

 Towards the close of the eleventh century a modified feudalism 

 had taken fast hold of this northern kingdom. By a fiction of 

 law the ownership of the soil was vested in the sovereign ; but the 

 fact cannot be disguised that some of the old territoi'ial families 

 claimed to be absolute proprietors of their estates, and asserted 

 they had as good a right to them as the king had to his own crown 

 lands or to his regal sceptre. You remember what some mutinous 

 Scotch barons said to the king when on one occasion he asked to 

 see the title-deeds of their estates. In answer they drew their 

 swords and boldly told his majesty that by these weapons they had 

 won their lands and meant to keep them. These words were no 

 idle boast ; and while many of the smaller landowners and the 

 vassals who bona fide held their estates from the king yielded him 

 loyal service and tribute, not a few of the more powerful lords 

 paid but scanty homage and scrimper sums of money to the Crown. 

 In this way the feudal system, so far as taxation is concerned, 

 was never anything like so successful on the north side as it was 

 on the south side of the Tweed. Mr M'Dowall went on to show 

 how the Douglasses held such an autocratic rule over Galloway 

 and part of Dumfriesshire that the land impost levied by the 

 government yielded little or nothing in these parts of Scotland for 

 a long period. Speaking about the origins of the land tax he said : 

 By law and custom the king was empowered to levy special taxes 

 on three difierent occasions whenever they arose — one on his eldest 

 son being knighted, another when his eldest daughter got married, 

 and a third to ransom himself in case of being made prisoner, an 

 unfortunate casualty that befell no fewer than three of our kings 

 during the Middle Ages. To William the Lion we in Dumfries 

 are indebted for having raised the town to the rank of a royal 

 burgh about the year 1190. Sixteen years prior to that date he 



