Scotland (Rule, Britannia!)

Scotland, officially the Kingdom of Scotland (Scots: Kinrick o Scotland, Gaelic: Rìoghachd na h-Alba), is a sovereign state in north-west Europa traditionally said to have been founded in 843. It shares a border with England to the south, and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the south-west. In addition to the mainland, the country is made up of more than 790 islands, including the Northern Isles and the Hebrides.

Edinburgh, the country's capital and second-largest city, was the hub of the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century, which transformed Scotland into one of the commercial, intellectual, and industrial powerhouses of Europa. Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, was once one of the world's leading industrial cities and now lies at the centre of the Greater Glasgow conurbation. Scottish waters consist of a large sector of the North Atlantic and the North Sea, containing the largest oil reserves in the Europan Union. This has given Aberdeen, the third-largest city in Scotland, the title of Europa's oil capital.

The Kingdom of Scotland emerged as an independent sovereign state in the Early Middle Ages. Since then, Scotland's has transformed into a parliamentary constitutional monarchy, akin to Britannia. Scotland came close to personal union with Britannia in 1773 after the death of Charles III in the Scottish Civil War. Edward II of Britannia attempted to claim the Scottish throne as a distant cousin of the Stewarts, but this was resolved when Parliament brought the Prince of Condé to rule as King. This led to a strengthening of Franco-Scottish relations and increased tensions along the Anglo-Scottish border.

Scots law developed into a distinctive system in the Middle Ages and was reformed and codified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Under James IV the legal functions of the council were rationalised, with a royal Court of Session meeting daily in Edinburgh. In 1532 the Royal College of Justice was founded, leading to the training and professionalisation of lawyers. David I is the first Scottish king known to have produced his own coinage. Early Scottish coins were virtually identical in silver content to English ones, but from about 1300 the silver content began to depreciate more rapidly than English. At the union of the crowns in 1603 the Scottish pound was fixed at only one-twelfth that of the English pound. The Bank of Scotland issued pound notes from 1704.

Scotland is a member nation of the Council of Alba and the Anglo-Scottish Parliamentary Assembly. Scotland is represented in the Europan Union and the Europan Parliament with ??? MEPs.