By Richard Oram
This volume of essays has its origin in a chance conversation in 1993 in which it emerged that no event had been organised to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the forfeiture of the Lordship of the Isles by King James IV of Scotland. The result was a small academic conference the following year based at Ballygrant on Islay, close to the former symbolic centre of the Lordship at Finlaggan, and plans to bring the papers from that conference together as a published collection.