First and foremost, I wish to thank the Series Editor, Roger W. Shuy, for his encouragement and trust in this project. Th e writing process has benefi ted greatly from the comments on the initial publication proposal and from the feedback off ered by anonymous reviewers. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education for the individual grant (N N104 014337), as well as the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), and the Warsaw Scientifi c Society for their fi nancial support. I would like to thank Jacek Fisiak for fi rst encouraging me to take up “a Scottish subject” and keeping a watchful eye over my academic progress at Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna?. Th is study relied on access to electronic repositories of early Scottish legal and administrative texts, most importantly, the Edinburgh Corpus of Older Scots . Its author Keith Williamson deserves my warmest thanks for letting me use his fi les and his time. Historical texts require special care when subjected to corpus tools. I was lucky to have met Dariusz Str??y?ski, who wrote the customized soft ware and patiently modifi ed it according to my never-ending corrections. He also adjusted the spelling unifi cation soft ware to the requirements of the Scots language. Here I would also like to thank Alistair Baron, who developed the VARD 2.3 soft ware for standardizing historical spelling and kindly shared it with me.