ABSTRACT
In contrast in the study of the early medieval burgh, where documentary evidence had long since been taken to its cultivation limits, historians have been obliged, with profit, either to turn to other disciplines such as archaeology for advice or to ask fresh questions of the limited evidence available.It is for this reason that this collection has as one of its aims an effort to integrate the history of urban Scotland into the new thinking, both about government and the other localities, which has so notably marked out the history of early modern Scotland in recent years. It had a fairly predictable effect on burghs like Dundee and Perth and it gave indirect advantages to Glasgow, but above all it dealt a telling blow to Edinburgh's growing monopoly of trade and credit, which had so characterised the first forty years of the seventeenth century.
