"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.

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