James I. (1394‒1437)

James I., king of Scotland from 1406 to 1437, son of Robert III., born at Dunfermline; in 1406, while on a voyage to France, he was captured by the English and detained by Henry IV. for 18 years, during which time, however, he was carefully trained in letters and in all knightly exercises; returning to Scotland in 1424 with his bride, Jane Beaufort, niece of the English king, he took up the reins of government with a firm hand; he avenged himself on the nobles by whose connivance he had been kept so long out of his throne, reduced the turbulent Highlanders to order, and introduced a number of beneficial reforms (e. g. a wider parliamentary franchise, a fixed standard for the coinage, a supreme court of civil jurisdiction, a renovated system of weights and measures), and widened Scotland's commercial relations with the Continent; he was a man of scholarly tastes, a patron of learning, and exhibits no mean poetic gift in his well-known poem the “King's Quhair”; his vigorous and sometimes harsh and vindictive efforts to lower the powers of the nobility procured him their inveterate hatred, and in 1437 he was murdered in the Dominican monastery at Perth by a band of conspirators (1394‒1437).

Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)