Noble Society In Scotland

Even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was conventional for humanist writers and their Enlightenment successors to regard the nobility which dominated early modern Scottish society and politics as violent, unlearned, and backward - at best conservatively bound to feudal codes of behaviour; at worst, brutal, corrupt and anarchic. It is a view that prevails still. Keith Brown takes issue with this. The author draws on extensive research in the rich archives of the Scottish noble houses