Before the fourteenth century contemporaries did not think of a division between Highlands and Lowland society. There was on 'Highland line' and the main physical divisions were still the Forth, the Mounth and druim Alban (the spine of Britain); these did not correspond to the Highland line when it emerged but cut across it, separating western from central and Grampian Highlands.

A more significant distinction could be made between the far north-west beyond Ardnamurchan and the rest of the Highlands. There were no monasteries in the north-west, in contrast to the medieval foundations in Argyll which were undergoing extensive refurbishment in the fifteenth century; parish kirks (churchs) were spread far more thinly across its landscape.

 The small Isles, the Outer Isles and the north-west mainland lacked both the hall-houses and stone castles which proliferated in mainland Kintyre and Argyll, and on Lismore or Mull.

All of the Highlands lacked burghs, but there were both fairs and licensed markets - seventeen in all by 1550.

 Important medieval burghs such as Inverness, Elgin or Perth were situated on the fringes of the Highlands; the extent of their impact is unknown because so few of their early charters have survived. The volume of the export trade in hides from Inverness and the huge number of animal bones revealed in archaeological excavations in Perth, of deer as well as cattle and sheep, suggest a close link operated between town and Highland countryside.

 In the sixteenth century, for which more evidence is available, it is clear that the traffic was two-way: Perth's metalworkers had customers for their agricultural implements as far away as Inverness-shire. Moray, Easter Ross, the Lennox, much of the Grampian and central Highlands and Argyll were all well within range of Lowland influence of various kinds.

The structure of rural settlement was much the same in the Highlands as it was in the Lowlands, although the balance, because of the poor quality of the soil, was more firmly tilted towards pastoral farming. Most of the peasantry, as in the Lowlands, held their land as tenants or sub-tenants on a short lease, although in places there might be greater expectation in the Highlands that land might be held of kinsmen; in Kintyre in1541 two-thirds of lands leased by the crown to a Mackay were sub-let to other Mackays. Nor had the Highlands escaped the impact of the Anglo-Norman era: successive waves of feudal settlers infiltrated the society of the eastern Highlands from the late twelfth century until the very end of the thirteenth.

Parallel to this, as elsewhere, ran the recasting of existing custom and power structures in feudal terms. Even the west Highlands did not escape: the first surviving charter for knight service, granting land east of Loch Awe to Gillascop macGilchrist, dates from 1240.

 The only variant along the western seaboard was that the service was usually for a galley of so many oars rather than a mounted knight.

In almost every respect, the difference between Highlands and Lowlands was of degree rather than kind: both were aristocratic societies, organised for war, held together largely through the force of kin. Their differences have been neatly summed up:

'Highland society was based on kinship modified by feudalism, Lowland society on feudalism tempered by kinship.'