during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Scotland’s history is a striking success. Five themes stand out. The first is general economic growth: developing agriculture sustained a population rise to around the million mark, while flourishing wool and leather exports through the east-coast burghs boosted the money supply to over 40 million silver pennies (some £180,000), circulating interchangeably with England’s in a medieval ‘sterling area’. The second is political expansion: from its eastern heartland between the Forth and the Grampians, the kingdom spread north, south and west, reaching virtually its modern boundaries when the Western Isles were annexed from Norway in 1266. The third is the consolidation of political authority behind a clearly defined royal line, which established the principle of succession by primogeniture, and introduced ‘modern’ governmental and religious institutions, like those of France and England (if less bureaucratised). The fourth is the establishment of a simple but effective system of local power, in which a network of sheriffdoms added a layer of crown authority to an older landowning structure consisting of large ‘provincial’ earldoms and lordships (see map 6) interspersed with smaller baronies (mostly held by ‘Norman’ families brought in from England by twelfth-century kings). And the fifth is the maintenance, none the less, of a ‘balance of New and Old’: Gaelic families and practices survived even at the highest levels, so that, although Scotland had become a fairly typical European kingdom, it was ethnically hybrid, defined simply by its people’s allegiance to their king.