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The Parliament of Scotland, officially the Estates of Parliament, was the legislature of the independent Kingdom of Scotland.
The unicameral parliament of Scotland is first found on record during the early thirteenth century, and the first meeting for which reliable evidence survives (referred to, like the contemporaneous Parliament of England, as a colloquium in the surviving Latin records) was at Kirkliston (a small town now on the outskirts of Edinburgh) in 1235, during the reign of Alexander II of Scotland .
The parliament, which is also referred to as the Estates of Scotland, the Three Estates (Thrie Estaitis), the Scots Parliament or the auld Scots Parliament (old), met until the Acts of Union merged the parliament of Scotland and the Parliament of England, creating the new Parliament of Great Britain in 1707.
The pre-Union parliament was long portrayed as a constitutionally defective body that acted merely as a rubber stamp for royal decisions, but research during the last decade has found that it played an active role in Scottish affairs, and was sometimes a thorn in the side of the Scottish crown.