Our argument derives considerable support from the references to the Highlands of Scotland which we find in mediaeval literature.  Racial distinctions were not always understood in the Middle Ages; but readers of Giraldus Cambrensis are familiar with the strong racial feeling that existed between the English and the Welsh, and between the English and the Irish.  If the Lowlanders of Scotland felt towards the Highlanders as Mr. Hill Burton asserts that they did feel, we should expect to find references to the difference between Celts and Saxons.  But, on the contrary, we meet with statement after statement to the effect that the Highlanders are only Scotsmen who have maintained the ancient Scottish language and literature, while the Lowlanders have adopted English customs and a foreign tongue.  The words “Scots” and “Scotland” are never used to designate the Highlanders as distinct from other inhabitants of Scotland, yet the phrase “Lingua Scotica” means, up to the end of the fifteenth century, the Gaelic tongue.[13] In the beginning of the sixteenth century John Major speaks of “the wild Scots and Islanders” as using Irish, while the civilized Scots speak English; and Gavin Douglas professed to write in Scots (i.e. the Lowland tongue).  In the course of the century this became the regular usage.  Acts of the Scottish Parliament, directed against Highland marauders, class them with the border thieves.  There is no hint in the Register of the Privy Council or in the Exchequer Rolls, of any racial feeling, and the independence of the Celtic chiefs has been considerably exaggerated.  James IV and James V both visited the Isles, and the chief town of Skye takes its name from the visit of the latter.  In the beginning of the sixteenth century, it was safe for Hector Boece, the Principal of the newly founded university of Aberdeen, to go in company of the Rector to make a voyage to the Hebrides, and, in the account they have left us of their experiences, we can discover no hint that there existed between Highlanders and Lowlanders much the same difference as separated the English from the Welsh.  Neither in Barbour’s Bruce nor in Blind Harry’s Wallace is there any such consciousness of difference, although Barbour lived in Aberdeen in the days before Harlaw.  John of Fordun, a fellow-townsman and a contemporary of Barbour, was an ardent admirer of St. Margaret and of David I, and of the Anglo-Norman institutions they introduced, while he possessed an invincible objection to the kilt.  We should therefore expect to find in him some consciousness of the racial difference.  He writes of the Highlanders with some ill-will, describing them as a “savage and untamed people, rude and independent, given to rapine, ... hostile to the English language and people, and, owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation[14].”  But it is his custom to write thus of the opponents of the Anglo-Norman civil and ecclesiastical institutions, and he brings