ABSTRACT
Yet it was no accident that the Convention of Royal Burghs became by the early seventeenth century the most highly developed of these agencies; a spirit of cooperation had existed amongst representatives of different burghs since the fourteenth century or earlier, encouraged by the crown. It may be that the crown was intent on a gentrification of the key posts in burgh government rather than wholesale interference in it. By the last decade of the sixteenth century the boundaries between town and country were shifting again; the crown monitored the process but did little to influence it. One of the most awkward of the many problems which the crown and its associated institutions posed for the burghs, particularly in the middle quarters of the sixteenth century, was that it offered not too litde law but too much.
