Through her seminal study of bonding, Lords and Men in Scotland, Jenny Wormald placed the character and use of private agreements at the heart of the study of Scottish politics and society in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She demonstrated that the ‘rise of the personal bond’ was the key to understanding lordship, service and society. The development of these written contracts reflected the absence of a ‘strong, central system’ in Scotland. She rightly re-interpreted the reliance on private arrangements – traditionally regarded by historians and lawyers as a mark of weakness and backwardness – as the mark of a polity capable of effective self-regulation. While Steve Boardman has argued via a number of fifteenth-century case studies that the formation of bonds was often a direct result of violent feuding between parties rather than primarily an expression of less fraught relationships, Wormald's conclusions about the importance of such contractual agreements as a key component of Scottish political and social interaction have been accepted.

Less central to Wormald's argument was the way in which the use of similar, essentially private agreements characterised the exercise of govern - ment and political power at the highest levels in fifteenth-century Scotland. One of the most unusual entries in the lists of bonds that she assembled in the appendices to Lords and Men was the first of her ‘royal bonds’. This was dated 16 January 1453 at Lanark and contained a promise by James, ninth and last earl of Douglas to deliver his manrent and service to King James II. Only one other bond was listed by Wormald as being given to an adult king (also to James II by the minor borders landowner, James Tweedie of Drumelzier, in 1455). However, rather than a virtually unique example of the use of such bonds by an adult ruler, this ‘Lanark bond’ needs to be understood in the context of approaches to royal government which, in certain conditions, could employ the methods and language of private agreements.

Just a few months earlier, in late August 1452, there had been ‘ane appoyntement’ between the same two figures, the king and the earl of Douglas, issued from Douglas Castle in Lanarkshire.