Challenging traditional assumptions of general late-medieval decline, Alexander Grant demonstrates how the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a crucially important period of change and growth for Scotland. Under Robert Bruce and his successors, Scotland maintained its independence from England and developed its sense of nationhood, with a profound effect upon domestic and foreign affairs. Dr Grant argues that this led to the evolution of a distinctive Scottish government, nobility, Church and economy, and puts Scottish history into the international context of the Hundred Years War, the plague and pre-Reformation Christianity.