Late medieval and early modern Scotland was notoriously a feuding society, overstocked with overmighty aristocracy and therefore awash with bloodshed and civil disorder; so said a typically contemptuous English observer in the late sixteenth century, and a number of suitably Enlightened Scottish lawyers and historians of later times. It was indeed a feuding society, in the sense that the word ‘feid’, as defined in an act of parliament of 1598, covered everything from the full-scale and classic feud which involved vengeance killing to civil dispute from which violence was entirely absent. It was also a feuding society in that there were major, long-term and very bloody feuds. But above all, it was a feuding society which strove for peace; historians have listened to what the wealth of documentation about the feud has to say about dispute and violence, but have been rather more deaf to what it tells us about the efforts to curtail violence and end dispute. But the evidence is there, in great quantity. We can get a bird's-eye view of the settlement of dispute in sixteenth-century Scotland in a way which is not possible for the early medieval world. But there is much in common between the two; in both, the underlying principle that disputes should be settled and not prolonged, in the most effective way possible, was exactly the same. There is good reason, therefore, to bring the detailed analysis which can be made of a dispute settlement of the sixteenth century to bear on those of the early medieval period, which this book illuminates.