The reign of Robert I’s son, David II (1329-71), still a small child when he became king, saw a swift resumption of Anglo-Scottish hostilities, exacerbated by the campaigns of families who had lost property under Robert I, and other disaffected Scots. These protracted wars took their toll on Scotland’s economic development, but trade with England continued nonetheless, and increases in taxation to pay for the fighting saw representatives of the royal burghs granted the right, in exchange, to sit in Parliament with the nobles and churchmen.

Whatever the accomplishments of his later descendants, the accession of the first Stewart monarch, Robert II (1371-90) began an extended period of largely undistinguished kingship in Scotland, exacerbated by a succession of royal minorities in the ensuing two centuries. This weakness at the centre enabled the aggrandisement of other aristocratic dynasties, notably the Douglases in the Borders, and later the Crichton, Livingston and Boyd families, while the clan-based Lords of the Isles – rulers of a semi-devolved fiefdom established in the 13th century - were also growing increasingly powerful in the north-west. Political representation continued gradually to expand, although the Scottish Parliament remained an essentially feudal body.

After John MacDonald, the last Lord of the Isles, made a treaty with England’s Edward IV, and his nephew led a rebellion against James III (1460–88), the Highland quasi-kingdom was fully appropriated to the Scottish state in 1493, although the ensuing lack of central authority in the region was to help sow seeds of future unrest. With the acquisition of Orkney and Shetland around 1470 – and the temporary recapture of Berwick from the English between 1461 and 1482 - independent Scotland achieved its maximum geographic dimensions.

The country’s cultural health at this time is reflected in the literary “golden age” of Henryson, Douglas and Dunbar, and in a wealth of fine church building. The cultured, handsome James IV (1473-1513) was widely regarded as a model of kingship, praised equally as a soldier, politician and patron of the arts. He signed a “treaty of perpetual peace” with England’s Henry VII in 1502, a bargain sealed by his marriage to Henry’s daughter Margaret the following year. After Henry VIII succeeded his father in 1509, however, it wasn’t long before older loyalties prevailed, leading Scotland to renew the Auld Alliance with France. James recklessly raised an army against Henry, and died with thousands of his followers – the fabled “flower of Scottish knighthood” – at the disastrous battle of Flodden in 1513.