Scottish society is the group behaviour of Scots, how they organise themselves and make decisions. The social history of Scotland is a major field within the academic study of Scottish history. Scottish society is based on Western society, and has made key contributions to the spread of Western culture throughout the world. It has been developing for many centuries, since Scotland started to emerge as a country in the Early Middle Ages. Scots share many social and cultural characteristics, for example dialect, music, arts, social habits, cuisine and folklore. Scotland is an ethnically and racially diverse country as result of large-scale immigration from many different countries throughout its history. Scottish society in the Middle Ages From the departure of the Romans from Britain in the fifth century to the establishment of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century, Scottish society was obscurely formed and there aare few documentary sources. Kinship groups provided the primary system of organisation and society was probably divided between a small aristocracy, whose rationale was based around warfare, a wider group of freemen, who had the right to bear arms and were represented in law codes, above a relatively large body of slaves, who may have lived beside and become clients of their owners. From the twelfth century onwards there are sources that allow the stratification in society to be seen in detail, with layers including the king and a small elite of mormaers above lesser ranks of freemen and what was probably a large group of serfs, particularly in central Scotland. In this period the feudalism introduced under David I meant that baronial lordships began to overlay this system, the English terms earl and thane became widespread. Below the noble ranks were husbandmen with small farms and growing numbers of cottars and gresemen (grazing tenants) with more modest landholdings. The combination of agnatic kinship and feudal obligations has been seen as creating the system of clans in the Highlands in this era. Scottish society adopted theories of the three estates to describe its society and English terminology to differentiate ranks. Serfdom disappeared from the records in the fourteenth century and new social groups of labourers, craftsmen and merchants, became important in the developing burghs. This led to increasing social tensions in urban society, but, in contrast to England and France, there was a lack of major unrest in Scottish rural society, where there was relatively