absence of enclosures, they simply mean that no fences of any kind—either in the form of hedges, wooden palings, stone dykes, or ditches-were anywhere to be seen. At the period of which we are speaking such enclosures had become common in certain districts of England, and the absence of them in Scotland was one of the things that immediately struck the English visitor. As Parliamentary legislation on the subject proves, however, fences were not so absolutely unknown in Scotland 25 as these observers would have us believe, but the fact is indisputable that it was not till well forward in the eighteenth century that fences became general even in the most highly-cultivated districts of the Scottish Lowlands; and the historian, Major, specifies the reason. The tenants, he says, "have no permanent holdings, but hired only, or in lease for four or five years, at the pleasure of the lord of the soil; therefore do they not dare to build good houses, though stone abound; neither do they plant trees or hedges for their orchards, nor do they dung the land; and this is damage to the whole realm." 26 that resulted from the lack of fences, insisted on by Major, were the subject of serious consideration in contemporary England. Thus, Fitzherbert in his Boke of Surveyinge has these emphatic words: "If an acre of land be worth sixpence or (before) it be enclosed it will be worth eightpence when it is enclosed by reason of the composting

no small loss and The disadvantages

and dunging of the cattle, that shall go and lie upon it both day and night." "

27

As has just been said, it was long after the time of Mary before Scottish agriculture profited by the example of England in the matter of a regular system of fencing. A century after John Major (1628) the facetious Lithgow has the following poetical outburst, which, of course, is as applicable to the reign of Mary as to that of Charles I., when it was actually written :

"Ah! what makes now my country look so bare;
Thus voyd of planting, woods and forests fair,
Hedges and ditches, parks and closed grounds,
Trees, strips, and shaws in many fertile bounds,
But only that the landlords set their land
From yeare to yeare, and so from hand to hand;
They change and flit their tenants as they please,
And will not give them lease, tacks, time nor ease;

And so the peasants cannot set nor plant

Woods, trees, and orchards, which my valleys want."

Almost exactly a century after Lithgow wrote this complaint, an elaborate treatise was published in Edinburgh (1729) dealing with the same question. The author simply styles himself "A Lover of his Country," but we know him to have been a marked person in his day-William Macintosh of Borlum. The title of his book fully explains its object, and is, moreover, a commentary on the point we are considering. He calls it An Essay on Ways and Means to Raise Funds sufficient to Prosecute

Inclosing the Nation and Finish in a Few Years that Useful and Glorious Design. If we accept Macintosh's statement, the "useful and glorious design" was truly in crying need of accomplishment. Our country, he says, is now "almost destitute of woods, closes, hedgerows, and forests," and again, "generally our country (is) destitute of woods, some shires entirely without a bush or a stake in it" (sic). 28 With his ingenious proposal we are not here concerned, though his book is both instructive and amusing reading, but it is to be noted that he assigns the absence of enclosures in Scotland to the same cause as Major and Lithgow -the short and precarious leases of tenants. One fact which he records, however, may be noted in passing it was in Lothian that the practice began of fencing fields, and in Macintosh's day some proprietors in that district had enclosed the greater part of their estates.29

From this description of certain features of th Scotland of Queen Mary it will be realised how widely it differed in its general aspect from the Scotland of to-day. The general absence of timber, the frequent lochs and morasses, the total lack of enclosures, producing that monotony of landscape with which we are familiar in continental countriesall this suggests a somewhat dreary picture— suggests, indeed, the lourde Ecosse, which made such a dismal impression on Mary's gay attendants who had accompanied her from "sunny France."

But we should be greatly mistaken if we imagined the Scotland of the sixteenth century to have been in its length and breadth an unbroken waste—a land of swamps and stony wildernesses, which knew not the diligent hand of man. Even by the reign of David I. we know that the process of bringing the land under cultivation had been strenuously begun, and from his day onwards legislation and private enterprise had gone hand in hand in prosecuting the good work. As far as our materials allow, let us see how far the work had been accomplished, and so have a glimpse of another aspect of Scotland than that which we have been considering.

It was unlucky for Scotland that some of its most productive districts immediately adjoined its "old enemy of England." Sir Walter Scott makes a suggestion which may not be without foundation.30 David I., he says, in planting his great religious houses near the Borders, may have been prompted by politic as well as pious motives. Cultivated lands owned by the Church might be in safer hands than in those of lay proprietors who had no immunity from religious considerations. In point of fact, however, as our annals amply prove, even while the pre-Reformation Church still endured, the English in their inroads made little distinction between secular and ecclesiastical property, and after Henry VIII.'s breach with Rome it was with added zest that they laid their hands on the belongings of the old clergy.

B

31

The records of English invasions down to near the middle of the sixteenth century amply prove what scope they had for doing mischief. Crossing the Tweed, the invading host could at once begin its work of devastation, for the Merse, though excelled in fertility by certain other parts of Scotland, was a law-abiding district, whose inhabitants had long cultivated the ways of peace. Surely in this, says Bishop Leslie, "very unlike to all the rest of the Border-men round about, who neither in peace or war can be restrained from taking the prey." In the sixteenth century, according to the testimony of an English traveller, oats and barley were abundantly grown in the Merse, and we know what havoc was wrought in these crops by the Earl of Hertford in his terrible invasion of the autumn of 1545. As the chief places in the Merse which offered further booty Leslie specially notes Duns, Langton, and Dunglas with its "fair collegiate kirk." 32 If the enemy chose to enter the country by Teviotdale rather than by the Merse, a still richer spoil awaited him. He could overrun the cultivated lands of the great abbeys of Kelso, Jedburgh, and Melrose, where, besides abundant store of oats and barley, he would find sheep in such number that "they were a wonder to behold."

But it was when the invader made his way into Lothian that he could satisfy his rapacity to the full. Contemporary testimony is divided as to whether Lothian or Fife or Moray came first in