Seventeenth-century Scottish parliamentary rolls and political factionalism: the experience of the covenanting movement

The nature of factionalism within the Scottish Parliament in general and within the
Covenanting Movement in particular has remained an understudied topic of historical analysis by Scottish political and constitutional historians. Partly this can be attributed to the relative dearth of research into Scottish parliamentary history; there has been no systematic study of the Scottish Parliament since R.S. Rait’s The Parliaments of Scotland (Glasgow, 1924) and C.S. Terry’s The Scottish Parliament: Its Constitution and Procedure, 1603-1 707 (Glasgow, 1905). Specialised studies have also been hindered by the fact that few official parliamentary voting records have survived for the course of the seventeenth century.