James vi inherited a system of government from his late medieval forebears that was heavily dependent upon co-operative nobles and lairds governing their regions in line with crown policy. Such reliance did not necessarily mean, however, that government was less effective as a result, for the crown could secure the co-operation of regional elites with lands, titles and offices that further legitimised and underwrote the authority of these prominent figures. It was a mutually dependent, and beneficial, relationship, and borderers, like lowlanders and highlanders, had much to gain from co-operating with the crown, as did the crown in retaining their co-operation. For this arrangement to work, however, sufficiently developed structures of authority needed to be in place in each region, and the authority recognised of those that headed them. This was as true of the Middle March as elsewhere in Scotland. Whilst the power of the Middle March's elite was legitimised by the crown, in terms of office and jurisdiction, at the same time it was dependent on the support of those whom they governed and the subordinates’ acknowledgement of their superiors’ authority. This chapter will investigate how the structures of authority were formed in the Middle March, who led them and how they exercised power, including their provision of good lordship: it will suggest that these socio-political structures, their inbuilt chains of authority and their associated obligations, provided a network of power that was itself part of a machinery of government. Formal office-holding is considered separately in chapters 3 and 4; this chapter is concerned primarily with the framework of authority that was formed by the social structures of the region.

The second main theme of this chapter is the impact of kinship upon such socio-political structures. Society throughout Scotland was stratified horizontally into nobles, greater, lesser and bonnet lairds, and those below. Cutting vertically through these layers, however, was the grouping formed by kinship, whereby one kindred could contain members of all socio-economic levels from the richest noble to the poorest tenant. By the sixteenth century, each kindred was identified by the surname of its members: in the Highlands these groupings became known as clans, in the Borders, as ‘surnames’, and everywhere as of their ‘name’.