ntury Canons that is known to
exist in Scotland.

In 1794 eight official volumes of the Scottish Secretary of State's
Register of Seisins were discovered in a bookseller's shop in Edinburgh,
after they had remained concealed for more than 185 years.

Among the great mass of interesting Scottish manuscripts preserved in
our General Register House, there is one dated Arbroath,--April
1320;--perhaps the noblest Scottish document of that era. It is the
official duplicate of a letter of remonstrance addressed to Pope John
XXII. by the Barons, Freeholders, and Community of Scotland, in which
these doughty Scotsmen declare, that so long as a hundred of them remain
alive, they will never submit to the dominion of England. This venerable
record and precious declaration of Scottish independence, written on a
sheet of vellum, and authenticated by the dependant seals of its
patriotic authors, was detected by a deceased Scottish nobleman in a
most precarious situation; for he discovered it ruthlessly stuck into
the fire-place of his charter-room.

Contested points in Scottish Archaeology and history have been
occasionally settled by manuscript discoveries that were perfectly
accidental.

After the blowing up of the Kirk of the Field, the only one of Darnley's
servants that escaped was brought by the Earl of Murray before the
English Council, and there gave evidence, implying that Queen Mary--that
ever-interesting princess, who has been doubtlessly both over-decried by
her foes and over-praised by her friends--was cognisant of the intended
murder of her husband, inasmuch as, beforehand, she ordered an old bed
to be placed in Darnley's room, and the richer bed that previously stood
in it to be removed. Nearly three hundred years after that dark and
sordid insinuation was made, a roll of papers was casually found, during
a search among some legal documents of the early part of the seventeenth
century, and one of the leaves in that roll contained a contemporary and
authenticated official return of the royal furniture lost by the blowing
up of the King's residence. Among other items, this leaf proved, beyond
the possibility of further cavil, that the bed which stood in Darnley's
room was, up to the time of his death, unchanged, and was not, as
alleged by Mary's enemies, an old and worthless piece of furniture, but,
on the contrary, was "a bed of violet velvet, with double hangings,
braided with gold and silver (ung lictz de veloux vi