IT has been the prevailing view of late medieval Scotland that the political life of the realm was dominated by the relationship between its kings and the great nobles. Though bishops like James Kennedy and William Elphinstone have elbowed their way into the limelight, recognition of the roles and concerns of a wider political class has been rather limited. This applies to a landowning class of lesser nobles and freeholders, whose descendants in the sixteenth century have received much greater attention as agents of religious and social change, but who before 1500 have barely been defined as a group, let alone studied. This relative neglect also applies to the leading inhabitants of Scotland's burghs. The urban centres of the kingdom have been studied in terms of their economic activities, their social structures and their religious patronage. However, as elements in the political life of fifteenth-century Scotland, the role of burgesses and of burgh communities has tended to be treated as marginal and secondary to the relations between kings and magnates. On one level this is hardly surprising. The burghs of Scotland, small and economically unspecialised, were a far cry from the great communes of the Low Countries whose resources and ambitions made them challenging subjects for the Valois dukes of Burgundy. Nor can their political role be considered on a par with the bonnes villes de France whose support for the French monarchy was of major significance during the fifteenth century. However, the fairly recent interest in the provincial cities and boroughs of late medieval England has included a renewed sense of the political importance of urban communities, especially in relation to warfare and periods of crisis. In particular, Eliza Hartrich has directly addressed the political significance of towns and cities in fifteenth-century England. Hartrich criticised views of urban and political historians which have presented English boroughs as isolated, neutral and irrelevant in terms of national politics. She argued, instead, that boroughs and their inhabitants were a crucial component of England's political life. Their special status as legally-defined communities, their significance as settings, the interests and connections of their prominent inhabitants and their common concerns and interests as an urban sector all played an important part in wider frameworks and events.