The real turning-point was probably the death of Hakon two months later, while wintering in Kirkwall. It was a crisis of confidence in Norwegian kingship rather than a renewed offensive launched by Alexander III in Caithness, Skye and other parts of the Western Isles in 1264 which brought Hakon's successor, Magnus the Law-mender, to the negotiating table. The Treaty of Perth (1266) was the result. Although it involved the payment of a lump sum of 4,000 merks and an annuity of 100 merks (which continued to be paid into the fourteenth century), the Treaty did not involve homage or fealty. It was, in a real sense, an international peace treaty, a finales Concordia, which was sought as much by the Norwegians (who had been the initiators of peace talks) as by the Scots. In it, a firm boundary was fixed between the Northern Isles (which remained in Norwegian hands) and the Western Isles or 'Sudreys' and Man, which passed to the Scots. It thereby fixed the northern and western frontier of the kingdom as surely as the Treaty of York had fixed the southern border in 1237. And the marriage of Alexander's only daughter, Margaret, to Magnus's successor King Eric in 1281 provided Scotland with an escape route from the crisis of the succession which burst upon it on 19 March 1286, when the King fell to his death while riding at night near Kinghom in Fife. Or so it then seemed.

The thirteenth century in perspective

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw a clash of many cultures, too many to sum up as a single set of competing interests, Anglo-Norman versus Celtic. The position of kings of Scots was consolidated by a widening of the feudal settlement first begun in the reign of David I and a sharpening sense of a territorial kingdom already evident by the reign of Malcolm IV, but the independence of this realm was also under threat from the claims of Angevin kings which were also expressed in feudal terms.61 Each of these macmalcolm kings practised some version of hybrid kingship, drawing on the different assets and loyalties which Celtic and feudal kingship offered them, but the balance was a shifting one. No king tipped the balance more decisively towards feudal kingship than William the Lion, who gloried in the aura of French knightly culture, but increasing involvement in the west from the 1220s onwards made necessary a reappraisal of the Celtic face of Scottish kingship. It is hardly surprising that the reign of Alexander III, the first King of Scots to mount a successful offensive against a significant section of his own Gaelic subjects, should see a renewed interest in Gaeldom.