David II and the Government of Fourteenth-Century Scotland

Any attempt to discuss the reign of David II of Scotland is bound to be patchy and unsatisfactory because the evidence itself is so. There is for instance no good chronicle of the period. It is true that John of Fordun left some notes on the reign, through which he had lived; but his history was so largely de-voted to remoter and even mythical periods that he never worked up these notes into the history of his own times that he could have written. Later writers all based their work on his; they embroidered on what he wrote, but could not fill in the gaps. Hence the accounts that have survived of the reign consist of a number of isolated incidents rather than a continuous and intelligible narrative. Many more details can be discovered in the records of government, such as the Register of the Great Seal, the Exchequer Rolls, and the large number of surviving texts of the documents issued by David II; but these are again isolated scraps of evidence. What is missing is the framework into which this evidence needs to be fitted.