Note 279 — Chapter IX · The State.

Stat. Alex. II. 1. It shows how stationary—or rather retrograde—was the condition of Scotland in consequence of the disastrous English wars, and the weakness of the sovereign authority at a later period, that in the reign of James I., two hundred years after Alexander endeavoured to settle the agricultural population, a statute was passed to prohibit the lords spiritual and temporal from removing from their lands “colonos et husbandos pro anno futuro,” unless they required the land “ad usos suos proprios.”—Act. Jac. I., 1429; Act. Par. Scot. vol. 2, p. 17.