Robert Bruce: And the Community of the Realm of Scotland: An Edinburgh Classic Edition 9780748693979

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ROBERT BRUCE

The Edinburgh Classic Editions series publishes influential works from the archive in context for a contemporary audience. These works shifted boundaries on first publication and are considered essential groundings in their disciplines. New introductions from contemporary scholars explain the cultural and intellectual heritage of these classic editions to a new generation of readers. The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century George Elder Davie with an introduction by Murdo Macdonald and Richard Gunn and a foreword by Lindsay Paterson 2013 (first published 1961) Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland G. W. S. Barrow with an introduction by Michael Brown 2013 (first published 1965)

ROBERT BRUCE AND THE COMMUNITY OF THE REALM OF SCOTLAND G. W. S. BARROW With an Introduction by Michael Brown Edinburgh Classic Editions

In memory of my mother MARJORIE STEUART BARROW

© G. W. S. Barrow, 1965, 1976, 1988, 2005, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com First edition published in 1965 by Eyre & Spottiswoode Ltd Second edition published in 1976 by Edinburgh University Press Reprinted 1982 Third edition published in 1988 by Edinburgh University Press Reprinted 1992, 1995, 1996, 1999, 2001 Fourth edition published 2005 by Edinburgh University Press Classic edition published 2013 by Edinburgh University Press Typeset in 12/13.5 Ehrhardt by TechBooks, New Delhi, India, and Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 8522 6 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9397 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9398 6 (epub) The right of G. W. S. Barrow to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

Contents

Maps Abbreviations Introduction Preface part i

scotland under threat

Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

part ii

the struggle to survive

Chapter 6. Chapter 7. Chapter 8. Chapter 9. Chapter 10. part iii

A Kingdom in Perplexity Bruce of Annandale Bruce versus Balliol A Lamb among Wolves Two Kinds of War

Experiments in Guardianship The King over the Water Defeat Revolution A King in Search of his Throne

vii ix xii xxiii xiii

3 27 52 71 91

119 143 172 188 213

a kingdom reborn

Chapter 11. The Turn of the Tide Chapter 12. Bannockburn Chapter 13. War and Peace

245 266 304

vi contents Chapter 14. Good King Robert The Clergy The Nobles The Community of the Realm Chapter 15. In Search of Robert Bruce

341 342 351 380 405

Appendix Notes to Chapters Genealogical Tables Table of Dates Index

421 427 494 497 505

Maps

1. Scotland 1286–1329; physical features and communications 2. Scotland at the end of the thirteenth century 3. The Invasion of 1296 4. 1297 and early 1298 5. The Falkirk Campaign, 1298 6. The Rule of the Guardians, 1299–1302 7. The Invasion of 1303–4 8. 1306 9. 1307–9 10. The terrain of Bannockburn (1) 11. The terrain of Bannockburn (2) 12. Southern Scotland and Northern England to illustrate the Scottish raids, 1311–27 13. Buchan and Formartine, showing changes in landlordship in the reign of Robert I

21 25 94 108 129 147 164 192 216 270 279 306 356

Abbreviations

Abbreviations conform in general to the List of abbreviated titles of the printed sources of Scottish history to 1560, published as a supplement to the Scottish Historical Review, October 1963. In the notes, numerals which are set in roman capitals denote part numbers; those in lower-case roman, volume numbers; and those in arabic, page numbers, except that an arabic numeral preceded by ‘no.’ is the number of a document. Abbreviations not included in the List published in the SHR include the following: Annales Londonienses, in vol. i of Chronicles of the reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. W. Stubbs (Rolls Ser., 1882). Barrow, Kingdom G. W. S. Barrow, The Kingdom of the Scots (Edinburgh, 1973; 2nd edn, 2003). Barrow, Kingship G. W. S. Barrow, Kingship and Unity: Scotland, 1000–1306. The New History of Scotland, ii (Edinburgh, 1981; 2nd edn, 2003). BIHR Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research. BL British Library. . Cal. Chancery Warrants Calendar of Chancery Warrants: 1244–1326 (1927). Cal. Close Calendar of the Close Rolls. Cal. Inqu. Misc. Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous. Cal. Inqu. P.M. Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem. Cal. Pat. Calendar of the Patent Rolls. Chron. Bower (Watt) Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, ed. D. E. R. Watt and others (9 vols, Edinburgh, 1987–98). Chron. Guisb. The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, previously edited as the chronicle of Walter of Hemingford or

Annales Londonienses

x abbreviations

Chron. Man

Chron. Rishanger Chron. Stephen etc. Kingship Duncan, Kingship

EHR Flores Historiarum Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvan Le Bel, Chroniques NAS NLS Northumberland County History Parl. Writs

PRO PROI Reid, ‘Monarchy’

Scimus, fili SHR SRO Stones, Relations

Hemingburgh, ed. for the Royal Historical Society by Harry Rothwell (London, 1957). The Chronicle of Man and the Sudreys, ed. P. A. Munch and A. Goss (Manx Society, Douglas, 1874). Chronica Willelmi Rishanger, ed. H. T. Riley (Rolls Ser., 1865). Chronicles of the reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ed. R. Howlett (Rolls Ser.). A. A. M. Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots, 842–1292: Succession and Independence (Edinburgh, 2002). English Historical Review. Flores Historiarum, ed. H. R. Luard (Rolls Ser., 3 vols, 1890). Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvan, in vol. ii of Chronicles of the reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. W. Stubbs (Rolls ser., 1883). Les vrayes chroniques de Messire Jehan le bel, ed. L. Polain (Brussels, 1863). National Archives of Scotland (see also SRO). National Library of Scotland. A History of Northumberland (Northumberland County History Committee, 15 vols, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1893–1940). Parliamentary Writs and Writs of Summons, Edward I and Edward II, ed. F. Palgrave (Record Commission, 2 vols, 1827–34). Public Record Office, London. Public Record Office of Ireland, Dublin. N. Reid, ‘The Political Role of the Monarchy in Scotland, 1249–1329’, University of Edinburgh unpublished PhD thesis, 1984. Bull of Boniface VIII, 27 June 1299, in Stones, Relations, no. 28. Scottish Historical Review. Scottish Record Office, H M General Register House, Edinburgh now NAS. E. L. G. Stones, Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174–1328: Some Selected Documents, ed. E. L. G. Stones, 1965, 2nd edn, 1970.

abbreviations xi Stones and Simpson, Great Cause TRHS Vita Edwardi

Watt, Fasti

Watt, Graduates

Edward I and the Throne of Scotland, 1290–1296, ed. E. L. G. Stones and G. G. Simpson (2 vols, Oxford, 1978). Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Vita Edwardi Secundi monachi cuiusdam Malmesberiensis: the Life of Edward the Second by the so-called Monk of Malmesbury, ed. and translated by N. Denholm-Young (Nelson’s Medieval Texts, 1957). Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae Medii Aevi ad annum 1638, Second Draft, ed. D. E. R. Watt (St Andrews, 1969). D. E. R. Watt, A Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Graduates to AD 1410 (Oxford, 1977).

Introduction: ‘said on gud maner’

Storys to rede ar delatibill Suppos that thai be nocht bot fabill Than suld storys that suthfast wer And thai war said on gud maner Have doubill pleasance in heryng.1

T

he opening lines of John Barbour’s epic poem The Bruce, which was written in the 1370s, state that stories are delightful but true stories are doubly so if they are told well. It is hard not to think of Geoffrey Barrow’s Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland as the modern counterpart of Barbour’s Bruce. Just as Barbour’s poem was widely known and referred to as the authoritative account of King Robert’s reign through the century and more after its composition, so Barrow’s work can be said to enjoy similar standing today. Its publication in four editions, and its longevity since its first appearance in 1965, are remarkable in an age where a variety of pressures and tastes have fuelled a steep rise in the volume of books published and the rapid circulation of views and approaches. In the period since the 1960s which has seen the particular growth of Scottish historical studies, due in no small measure to Professor Barrow and his contemporaries, the continued influence of Robert Bruce is remarkable. At least three generations of Scottish historians have grown up with Barrow’s account of this central period of the country’s history as their

1

John Barbour, The Bruce, ed. A. A. M. Duncan (Edinburgh, 1997), 47.

introduction xiii yardstick. Many, like myself, will have read Robert Bruce as their first academic work dealing with medieval Scotland and been made aware of the full achievement of the king and the drama and richness of his times through Barrow’s words and ideas. Just as Barbour valued the telling of true stories for entertainment and for the understanding of past and present truths, so the ability to create a compelling narrative, informed and underpinned by the use and understanding of evidence, is a central (if often undervalued) element of the historian’s art. Though it bears the name of the king as its title, Barrow’s Robert Bruce is never constrained within the bounds of royal biography. The king and his reign are important to the work but its principal goal is to explain the crisis which engulfed the Scottish kingdom from 1286 and the way in which its people, the community of the realm, recovered their rights and liberties. To achieve this, Barrow produces an account of the trials and tribulations of this community from 1286 until the years after 1314 which is built on contemporary or near-contemporary accounts but which has a strength of flow that draws the reader along. This is clear from the opening pages. The work begins with the story which has haunted Scots since the day in February 1286 when King Alexander III left Edinburgh to travel to Fife. Interweaving the story of the king’s journey and death and its aftermath with a discussion of the realm Alexander ruled provides an opening to the narrative and an understanding of its context. With the same deftness, the events of late 1286 are employed to introduce the family of Bruce and the young Robert and to trace their long history as an introduction to the unravelling of Scotland’s fate into a contest between the Bruces and their rivals, the Balliols. These opening chapters pitch the audience into the complexities of the Scottish succession with a clarity that belies the maze of law, genealogy and political manoeuvring which dominated the period. They mark out Robert Bruce as one of the best pieces of historical narration of the last half century. It is true that Geoffrey Barrow, like John Barbour, has good material to work with. The story of Scotland’s loss of, first, Alexander and then his young granddaughter, Margaret of Norway, of the unavailing efforts of the Scots to challenge King Edward of

xiv introduction England’s demands for sovereignty, and of the defeat and humiliation of the hapless John Balliol provide the bones of a powerful narrative. Barrow is never content to leave these events as a simple tragedy. Instead he seeks to explain the underlying motives and principles driving (or driven by) these events. The struggle initiated by Wallace in 1297 and that launched by Bruce himself in 1306 are discussed with an eye to detail and the course of the military campaigns, but always set in a broader context of the politics of Britain and western Europe. The same adroit handling of the sequence of events continues into the years of warfare from 1296. The swings of fortune, from humiliation of 1296, through the rising of Wallace in 1297 and the emergence of Robert Bruce as a leading participant, to the second defeat in 1304–5, are conveyed in depth but without a loss of clarity or flow. Part of the reason for this lucidity is Professor Barrow’s ability to give texture to his discussion. He is a historian who appreciates the importance of individuals in the shaping of events and this is conveyed not simply with reference to the famous participants in the Great Cause and the wars like Edward I, Robert Bruce or William Wallace. Figures of secondary, but still great, significance also receive attention. Thus James Stewart, a guardian and a frequent opponent of Edward I, who just as frequently managed to make his peace with the English king, is identitified as ‘cautious and devious . . . not a man to make the first move, yet neither was he an ineffectual figure’.2 Barrow’s words on Stewart’s ally, Robert Wishart bishop of Glasgow, are equally judicious. Wishart, the spokesman of the Scots against Edward’s demands in 1291 and Bruce’s eminence grise in 1306, was described by one English chronicler as ‘the wicked bishop’ who, it was reckoned, had done homage on eight occasions to their king, breaking his faith each time. Barrow judges that Wishart ‘was not the stuff of which martyrs and heroes are made’ but adds that ‘he bent under pressure but never broke’.3 The survival of Scotland was the work of many and not simply a result of the few well-known ‘heroes’ and the set-piece battles they fought. The diplomacy of the Scots, in 2 3

Below, p. 106. Below, p. 106.

introduction xv which Stewart and Wishart played leading roles, is recognised as running in tandem with the war. The canon lawyer Baldred Bisset is described by Barrow as standing as a ‘forensic champion’ for his articulation of Scotland’s liberties before the Pope alongside the kingdom’s ‘military champion’, William Wallace.4 However, it is the war against Edward I which stands at the heart of events and of Robert Bruce. Barrow manages to make this more than a matter of distant events played out on an abstract landscape produced by the words of chroniclers. Instead, the movements of armies are conveyed in relation to a real world of hills and riverlands. In the campaign of 1300, often neglected in accounts of the war, a brief clash between English and Scottish forces in Galloway ends with the latter ‘fleeing to the moors’: ‘The English regretted they had brought no Welsh troops with them to give chase in this wild country. They had got the foxes into a cairn and now had no terriers.’5 Military events, an analysis of missed possibilities and a sense of ground, are conveyed in a few pithy sentences. Bruce’s flight across the central Highlands after the defeat of Methven in 1306, his war of survival the following year in Carrick and the advance of the king through the Pass of Brander in the teeth of the lord of Lorn’s men, all manage to place Robert and his enemies in an identifiable landscape.6 Nowhere is this skill deployed more effectively than in the account of Bannockburn. Like Barbour’s poem, it is hard not to see the battle as the climax of Barrow’s narrative. This climactic effect is not necessarily intended and Bannockburn could be seen as the start rather than culmination of Robert Bruce’s reign, but is a product of the skill with which the battle is recounted (and of the excitement of the events as they are recounted in the words of near-contemporaries). The various fourteenth-century accounts of the battle and the events which led up to it are not easy to form into a convincing narrative of these remarkable months and days. Barrow, whose account uses Barbour’s verse as its principal source, weaves a credible narration of the course of events in late June 1314 with a discussion of the 4 5 6

Below, p. 155. Below, p. 148. Below, pp. 207, 221, 233.

xvi introduction ground over which the widely-spread battle was fought. Though debates on this score have continued in the many accounts of the battle written since the publication of Robert Bruce, Barrow’s assessment of the various phases of the fighting and the ground on which they occurred is masterly and convincing. The sense of this landscape is integral to the account and contributes to making the chapter on Bannockburn a gripping tale in its own right and the best-written retelling of the battle. The success and importance of Robert Bruce is only partly as a compelling account of this crucial period of Scottish history. Its longevity and significance also derive from the strength of its analysis over the period from the 1280s to the 1320s. The ‘Scottish wars of independence’ have tended to attract writers whose sense of the period relates to issues and agendas which can be regarded as ahistorical or slanted in their assumptions and conclusions. In this environment, Robert Bruce has stood as an authoritative discussion which, from its first publication in 1965, set the course of debate. Despite the decades that have passed since it was written, Robert Bruce continues to be central to the teaching of the period at school and university level and to provide a starting point for scholars researching the subject. Above all, Barrow’s study set out to challenge assumptions and to develop what were new and revolutionary perceptions of this period. Some of the pre-existing assumptions have long been undercut by the arguments of Robert Bruce. The argument of Evan Barron that ‘the War of Independence was the achievement of Celtic Scotland . . . and that Teutonic Scotland – Lothian – had neither lot nor part in the Scots’ long struggle for freedom’, a view derived from early twentieth-century views of race and nation, was comprehensively challenged by the first edition of Robert Bruce.7 Barrow’s arguments on the subject provided early steps towards a more general reassessment of the way ideas of peoples and ethnicity should be discussed in the context of the Scottish kingdom between 1000 and 1300.8 7

E. M. Barron, The Scottish War of Independence (London, 1914), 1–12. See M. Hammond, ‘Ethnicity and the Writing of Medieval Scottish History’, SHR, lxxxv (2006), 1–27. 8

introduction xvii A debate which has proved longer lasting and harder to resolve has centred on the nobility in these years of crisis and war for Scotland. Barrow was among the first historians to tackle the preconception that the nobility played a selfish and restricted part in the struggle to maintain a sovereign Scottish realm. Instead motivated by private concerns, feuds and in some cases ambition for the throne, and concerned with the preservation of their English lands and interests, the nobles have frequently been portrayed as a group that was equivocal and half-hearted towards the survival of the Scottish realm. In Robert Bruce these nobles are appreciated for efforts which were at the heart of any Scottish resistance to Edward I and his heirs. The actions and achievements of two generations of nobles in sustaining the war over four decades, perhaps especially in the seven years of war from 1297 to 1304, are recognised. Although like Stewart they were not necessarily heroic, and like John Comyn and Robert Bruce they could be factious and certainly were not always successful (Comyn is described by Barrow as ‘brave’ but a ‘failure’), Barrow’s account places a heavy value on their resilience, identifying their persistance in a difficult (even at times apparently doomed) cause as indicative of the strength of their identification with the defence of the Scottish kingdom.9 As he says, ‘It is one thing to say that the nobility was rent asunder by feuds and factions . . . It is quite another, and certainly false, to say that the nobility as a whole lacked the will and effectiveness to conduct the war against England’.10 That the counter view, of a popular struggle in which the nobles obstructed the ‘cause’ as often as they assisted it, remains persuasive in some accounts reflects a determination to maintain a position in the teeth of the evidence fuelled by popular writing and a certain film. In his section on the nobility in chapter fourteen, Barrow provides an analysis of the aristocratic class which has been the basis for all later work on this group and on the redistribution of land in early fourteenth-century Scotland.11 9

Below, p. 189. Below, p. 351. 11 Below, pp. 351–80. For a recent discussion of this see A. Grant, ‘Bravehearts and Coronets: Images of William Wallace and the Scottish Nobility’, E. J. Cowan (ed.), The Wallace Book (East Linton, 2007), 86–106. 10

xviii introduction However, Geoffrey Barrow’s understanding of the crisis and wars of Scotland is not simply that politics was confined to the elite of church and nobility. At the heart, and in the title, of the book is the Community of the Realm. This concept is introduced in the aftermath of Alexander III’s death as the ‘universality of freemen’, non-nobles and nobles, burgesses, freeholders, knights, clergy and magnates who acted collectively in the absence of a ruler.12 The idea of a such a community as possessed of rights and capable of providing politcal leadership was expressed in a number of other realms and principalities in the thirteenth century, giving the Scots plenty of precedents for their actions. In the language and symbolism employed by the guardians who ran Scotland after Alexander’s death, the leaders of the Scots demonstrated a strong sense of these ideas and, as Barrow demonstrates, in their negotiations with Edward I and how they related to the practice of government. By identifying and tracing the idea of the community, Barrow gives events in Scotland after 1286 an importance in terms of contemporary political ideas. His emphasis on this concept allows the wars to be understood as more than a conflict of rival warlords, and avoids them being discussed as some kind of modern struggle for national liberation transposed to earlier centuries. Instead, the long crisis of Scotland is fitted into medieval ideas of shared liberties and freedoms, varied by class but also understood as belonging to corporate groups, burghs, provinces or kingdoms. This ideology can be regarded as having motivated and unified the disparate sequence of actions by which different groups of Scots resisted Edward I. It linked the negotiations with Edward in 1290 and 1291 with the defiance of King John in 1296, the rising of Wallace and his revival of the guardianship and, finally, Robert Bruce’s seizure of the throne in 1306. Geoffrey Barrow stresses that the actions in all these cases were ‘conservative’ and ‘feudal’, seeking to restore the Scottish realm and the relationships between its inhabitants that had existed before 1286. Thus Wallace was not ‘a popular leader of proletarian nationalism betrayed by selfish aristocrats’ but ‘politically and constitutionally . . . conservative’.13 12 13

Below, pp. 22–3. Below, p. 179.

introduction xix Like the leaders of parallel European revolts, the so-called Sicilian Vespers in 1282 and the Matins of Bruges in 1302, Wallace and his associates sought to maintain or recover existing rights which were denied by foreign rulers rather than overthrow established relationships. Perhaps the real revolutionaries in the 1290s were not Scottish ‘rebels’ but Edward I and his legal and financial officials who sought to impose his sovereignty in novel ways and to extend their demands on the services owed by the king’s subjects. The greatest interruption in the Scottish cause – and a pivotal point in the book – is Robert Bruce’s taking of the throne in 1306. The title of the chapter ‘Revolution’ indicates both the significance of this event and its disruptive character which went far beyond a change of leadership.14 It was in effect a change in the ideological position of the Scots and, given the record of the Bruce family since 1286, it is hard not to see the events of 1306 in terms of Robert’s inherited, if disputed, right to the throne. Barrow sees Bruce’s accession as ‘from one standpoint the private revolution of an ambitious man’ whilst being ‘much more momentously . . . the political revolution of the community of the realm’.15 Of course it could have been both of these things to Robert and to those Scots (very far from all) who recognised his accession in 1306. It should be added that, while Barrow argues that the coup was long planned, evidence from early 1306 can also be interpreted as Robert responding to a crisis in his own affairs (most clearly stemming from his killing of John Comyn) by first taking up arms, as his grandfather had done in 1286, and then taking the throne on Bishop Wishart’s encouragement.16 For Wishart and for others, Robert’s actions certainly represented the revival of the Scottish kingship and cause when they had seemed lost. The group of Scots who rose in support of both Bruce and Balliol which Barrow assembles is evidence that for many the maintenance of the sovereignty of the Scottish realm outweighed issues of faction.17 However, many of those who had fought hardest against Edward I 14

Below, p. 188. Below, p. 187. 16 For a recent evaluation of these events see A. Grant, ‘The Death of John Comyn: What was Going on?’ in SHR, lxxxvi (2007), 176–224. 17 Below, pp. 199–201. 15

xx introduction in Balliol’s name remained hostile to Bruce in the years after 1306. This is not to suggest that the community of the realm ceased to be significant because it was divided. Robert’s Scottish opponents continued to describe themselves as the community of Scotland in their dealings with their king, Edward II of England. For Bruce, a king whose legality was challenged and whose authority was resisted in his realm for eight years after 1306, appeals to the defence of the community of the realm were a central facet of his claims to rule. The recognition of this by Geoffrey Barrow, and the central place he gives to the idea of the community in his account of these years, have influenced all subsequent consideration of the crisis of Scotland. The real mark of the quality of the ideas and writing in Robert Bruce is provided by its longevity in print and as the most-read study of the king. Nearly half a century after its first publication, this book has retained its centrality in discussions of the period. Moreover these decades have not been fallow in terms of other major research on the period. In this, Professor Archie Duncan has often appeared as Geoffrey Barrow’s alter ego. Professor Duncan’s Acts of King Robert I, which edited and printed the writs, charters and letters, making accessible the records of the king’s government, particularly after 1314, can be regarded as the counterpart of Barrow’s Bruce.18 Amongst his many works, Duncan’s article on ‘The War of the Scots, 1306–1323’, his pamphlet The Nation of Scots and the Declaration of Arbroath and the later chapters of The Kingship of the Scots 842–1292 all complement Robert Bruce, providing differing perspectives and Duncan’s own forensic skills to the analysis of the period.19 Subsequent generations of scholars have operated in the shadow of these giants of medieval Scottish historiography. However Barrow’s former students, particularly Norman Reid and Alan Young, have produced works which add to his achievement. Reid’s work on guardianship and King Robert’s relations with his subjects and Young’s study of the Comyn family 18

The Acts of Robert I, ed. A. A. M. Duncan (Edinburgh, 1987). A. A. M. Duncan, The Nation of Scots and the Declaration of Arbroath (Historical Association, 1970); A. A. M. Duncan, ‘The War of the Scots, 1306–1323’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1992), 125–51; A. A. M. Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots 842–1292: Succession and Independence (Edinburgh, 2002). 19

introduction xxi provide new or amplified views of aspects of the period covered by this book.20 The same can be said of Fiona Watson’s detailed study of Anglo-Scottish warfare between 1296 and 1305 in her Under the Hammer, which focuses less on the longer-terms patterns of the Scottish cause in favour of a convincing analysis of Edward I’s approach to the conquest of Scotland.21 A wider sense of the Scottish wars has also developed in recent decades. Robert Bruce demonstrates this wider perpsective by placing the history of the kingdom in the context of English and European politics. From the 1980s a number of scholars have also explored the interconnections across the different realms of the British Isles in conjunction with the histories of the separate lands. The works of Sir Rees Davies and Robin Frame have explored the broad parameters of this and Frame and Sean Duffy have considered the importance of the Bruces’ activities around and across the Irish Sea.22 Colm McNamee’s War of the Bruces develops this approach by an integrated examination of Robert’s warfare in Scotland, Ireland and northern England, focusing especially on the years after 1314. His study demonstrates the length and bitterness of the war after Bannockburn, a phase in the conflict which fell most heavily on the people of the English north.23 The sense that Bannockburn was only the end of one phase in a conflict which ranged widely and which would continue to redefine Scotland for decades to come has also been encouraged by studies 20

N. Reid, ‘The Kingless Kingdom: The Scottish Guardianship of 1286–1306’, Scottish Historical Review, 61 (1982), 105–29; N. Reid, ‘Crown and Community under Robert I’ in A. Grant and K. Stringer (eds), Medieval Scotland: Crown, Lordship and Community (Edinburgh, 1993), 203–22; A. Young, Robert the Bruce’s Rivals: The Comyns 1212–1314 (East Linton, 1997). 21 F. Watson, Under the Hammer: Edward I and Scotland, 1286–1307 (East Linton, 1997). See also M. Brown, The Wars of Scotland: 1214–1371 (Edinburgh, 2004). 22 R. R. Davies, The British Isles 1100–1500 (Edinburgh, 1988); R. R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000); R. Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles (Oxford, 1990); R. R. Davies, ‘The Bruces in Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 24 (1974), 3–37; S. Duffy, ‘The Bruce Brothers and the Irish Sea World, 1306–29’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 21 (1991), 55–86; S. Duffy (ed.), Robert the Bruce’s Irish Wars (Stroud, 2002). 23 C. McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces: Scotland, England and Ireland at War 1306–1328 (East Linton, 1997). See also M. Brown, Bannockburn: The Scottish War and the British Isles, 1307–1323 (Edinburgh 2008).

xxii introduction of the era that followed Robert Bruce’s death. This was begun by Geoffrey Barrow’s colleague Ranald Nicholson, whose book Edward III and the Scots, dealing with the period 1327 to 1335, appeared the year after Robert Bruce.24 The most recent additions to this reappraisal of a neglected but critical era have been Michael Penman’s study of Bruce’s son and successor, David II, and Steve Boardman’s examination of the early Stewart kings.25 The result of this work has been to emphasise that, while King Robert was indeed a defining figure in late medieval Scotland, his legacy was overshadowed by continued conflict and change. Amid this healthy climate of divergance and debate, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland has continued to provide an authoritative and accessible analysis of the history of Scotland between 1286 and 1329. It presents a portrait of an era and a study of its central figure which is a masterpiece of historical writing. The reach and impact of this book has travelled well beyond Scotland. As he described King Robert as ‘one of the big figures of history’, so Geoffrey Barrow, by placing Bruce’s achievement and those of his contemporaries in Scotland in terms of ideas and their practical application, has made clear that its is possible for big things, events with wide implications, to happen in small countries.26

24

R. Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots (Oxford, 1966). M. Penman, David II (East Linton, 2004); S. Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III (East Linton, 1996); M. Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordship in Late Medieval Scotland 1306–1455 (East Linton, 1998); A. Grant, ‘Fourteenth-Century Scotland’ in M. Jones (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge, 2000), 345–74. 26 The quotation is from the preface of the first edition of Robert Bruce, xix. 25

Preface

he inspiration for this book came from two very different T sources. In the later 1950s the publisher Maurice Temple Smith, in charge of the substantial history list for Eyre and Spottiswoode, invited me to produce a book about late medieval Europe. Flattering as this was, I had to refuse, but in order not to seem ungrateful I put forward the idea of a book on Robert Bruce and the Scotland of his time. After consulting the directors, Maurice accepted my offer – perhaps he was attracted because Eyre and Spottiswoode were at the time publishing their highly successful series on the English monarchs. A book on Bruce would make a suitable companion. The other source was my discovery, almost by chance, of the constitutionality of William Wallace. In those days University College London used to provide ‘lunch hour lectures’ across the entire spectrum of knowledge. ‘Wallace’ was my topic for one of these. This involved looking at the documents associated with Wallace or issued by him, and this in turn led me to the documents, mostly edited by Joseph Stevenson, produced by the guardianship established at the death of Alexander III. It came as something of a shock to find that they were cast in the same mould. I was fascinated to discover that the political concept upon which all the Guardians, including Wallace, based their actions was that of the community of the realm or kingdom of Scotland. They all wished for a lawful monarch, preferably a king but if unavoidable a queen. In the temporary absence of a monarch the kingdom itself must be seen to act as a unity – in practice, no doubt, nobles, prelates and substantial freeholders, but in theory the entire Scottish nation. It seems clear that

xxiv preface Edward I did not believe in the reality of this concept, and it may be that at the start of his adult career Robert Bruce did not accept it either. When, therefore, I offered a book on Bruce to Maurice Temple Smith my aim was to demonstrate, if I could, how the Bruce family’s ambition to be recognized as heirs to the Scottish throne could be reconciled with the Scots’ determination to preserve the integrity and independence of their kingdom. Edward I’s decision to abolish that kingdom in 1304–5 played into the hands of Robert Bruce and the patriots: it was to be English conquest or revolution. The success of that revolution, against all the odds, meant that slowly but surely the kingdom of Scots, as it had been at the death of Alexander III, could be reconstructed. The English recognition of the kingdom of the Scots in the Treaty of Edinburgh (1328) was the greatest achievement of Bruce’s reign. The effective restoration of Alexander III’s realm meant, of course, that the community of the realm became almost hidden, though not so completely as in King Alexander’s time. But the ineptitude of Edward Balliol and the cruelty of Edward III brought a revival. After twenty or more desperate years monarchy and kingdom were restored to something comparable to the situation before 1286. A recent essay primarily concerned to demonstrate Robert I’s ruthlessness and contempt for legal niceties as he proceeded to ‘cow the community’1 ignores the fundamental difference between the rule of an adult monarch assisted by a conventional, customary council and the altogether unprecedented situation between 1286 and 1306 when (we are told) the community of the realm exercised influence and power over government. In this essay nothing is said about guardianship, yet guardianship was crucially important, for in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Scotland the community never ruled – rule was exercised in its name or with its authority. The Eyre and Spottiswoode edition of 1965 threatened to go into limbo. It was rescued by Archie Turnbull, Secretary of Edinburgh University Press, who conceived the idea of a small paperback with 1

R. J. Tanner, ‘Cowing the Community? Coercion and falsification in Robert Bruce’s Parliaments, 1309–1318’, Chapter 2 of Parliament and Politics in Scotland, 1235–1560, ed. K. M. Brown and R. J. Tanner (Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 50–73.

preface xxv illustrations, which materialized in 1976. Archie went on to urge me to produce a substantially revised edition, available in both hardback and paper, with a complete change of type fount. This third edition appeared in 1988, happily contemporary with Professor Archie Duncan’s splendid edition of the acts of Robert I (Regesta Regum Scottorum, vol. V). Both books have enjoyed a wide circulation. There the matter might have rested, had it not been for the third publisher, my old friend John Davey. He has persuaded me that a further edition, which must surely be the last, would be acceptable and ought to be provided with illustrations. Everyone who has published work dealing with the history of any part of Britain (or of Ireland for that matter) before the sixteenth century knows how difficult it is to find illustrations which are even faintly relevant, unless the work involves architecture, manuscripts or works of art. Fifteen have been chosen for this book, ranging from military topography by way of objects and buildings associated with events and personalities to original documents of crucial importance. A number of friends have helped me in various ways. My special thanks must be given to John Davey for having faith in a book already thirty-seven years old before it came within his sphere of responsibility. Equal thanks must go to Doris Williamson, who betrayed no hint of surprise on being asked to put text and footnotes into a fit state for the printers for the second time in sixteen years. I am especially grateful to her for undertaking the task with admirable celerity in spite of severe difficulties occasioned by family illness. By a lucky chance, my old friend Archie Duncan let me see the text of his remarkable study of The Kingship of the Scots, 842–1292: Succession and Independence (Edinburgh University Press, 2002) two years before its publication. The whole of Duncan’s book is relevant to any picture we may form of medieval Scotland, and the last six chapters are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Great Cause, which forms the subject of Chapters 2 and 3 of my own book. By another lucky chance, my somewhat irregular correspondence with the distinguished genealogist Andrew Macewen, which goes back many years, introduced me, just in time, to his bold and to my mind convincing hypotheses in regard to the descent of the earls and earldom of Carrick. My adoption of his ideas here is due to

xxvi preface his characteristic kindness and generosity. Many other friends have helped me in many different ways. On the subject of seals and other significant artefacts, and Isabel Bruce’s trousseau, as well as over the choice and quality of illustrations, Virginia Glenn has been a great help. Friends have also been active in producing or updating editions of major sources or research tools without which the modern scholar might still flounder in uncertainty. Before his much regretted death, Donald Watt had shepherded into triumphant completion his edition of Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon (1987–98). At the same time, Archie Duncan was producing an enormously informative edition of John Barbour’s Bruce (Canongate Classics, 1997, rev., 1999). Here are two major sources for fourteenth-century Scotland now readily available to any interested student. In conjunction with, respectively, Norman Shead and Athol Murray, Donald Watt found time to edit a much needed directory of Heads of Religious Houses and a revision of Fasti of the medieval Scottish church (Scottish Record Society, 2001–3). To all these kind friends, my warmest thanks. G.W.S.B. Edinburgh, 2004

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Scotland Under Threat

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A Kingdom in Perplexity

n the afternoon of Monday,  March , the king sat in Edinburgh Castle, dining late with the lords of his council and drinking, we may suppose, some of the blood-red wine of Gascony for whose payment a Bordeaux merchant was to sue for many years in vain. It was a wild day, overcast by equinoctial storm and evil omens. In the past twelve months a story had gone round Scotland that this would be the Day of Judgement. It must have been known to the king, for he joked about it at dinner. He was occupied with a vision more profane and less sombre than that of judgement: the young Frenchwoman, Yolande of Dreux, his wife of less than six months, whom he had left at the royal manor of Kinghorn across the Firth of Forth, twenty miles away by bad roads and the sea ferry. Forty-four years of age, a king for thirty-six, Alexander III had out-lived his first wife, Margaret of England, his two sons, and his daughter, the queen of Norway. His blood survived precariously and distantly, across the North Sea, only in his three-year-old granddaughter Margaret, whom the magnates of Scotland had, since February , accepted as heir to the throne. Doubtless nothing more than an uncomplicated desire for his young wife prompted Alexander, against his barons’ advice, to set off for Kinghorn in the teeth of a snow-laden northerly gale. Yet in the nature of things politics could never be very distant from the most private life of a thirteenth-century king. The land cried out for a more auspicious heir than the little ‘damsel of Norway’: a boy, present and in good health, unfettered by other dynastic claims, in place of a sickly girl overseas who might one day inherit the Norwegian throne.

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A husband’s uxoriousness was also a long-reigning king’s duty to his people. When Alexander reached Dalmeny the ferry master urged him to go back. The king asked if he was afraid. At once he got the answer ‘I could not die better than in the company of your father’s son,’ and was rowed across the two miles of rough water to the royal burgh of Inverkeithing. Landing in pitch darkness, with only three esquires for escort, the king was met by one of the bailies of the town, Alexander le Saucier, master of the royal sauce-kitchen. As bailie it would be his duty to meet the king and offer him hospitality. He was a married man and it can be assumed that his home was one of the substantial burgess houses of the town. He assured the king that he would provide him with honourable lodging until morning. In later ages it was common enough for men of all classes in Scotland, nobles, burghers and peasants, to address their sovereign with extraordinary bluntness. Something of this familiarity shows forth in the frank rebuke which Alexander the sauce-maker addressed to Alexander the king: ‘My lord, what are you doing out in such weather and darkness? How many times have I tried to persuade you that midnight travelling will bring you no good?’ But the king, again in character, brushed aside rebukes and invitations. Asking only for two countrymen to guide him, he and his escort set off along the rough coast road towards Kinghorn. What happened after that no one knows, save that escort and guides lost their master in the blackness of the night and the storm. Next morning he was found dead on the shore, his neck broken. A small feudal kingdom of perhaps half a million inhabitants had now, by a whole series of unlooked for calamities, been left leaderless, in a situation for which there was no precedent. For the best part of two hundred years it had been led and held together by vigorous, warlike kings commanding the allegiance of a feudally conservative yet quarrelsome and potentially violent nobility. The new sovereign, the ‘lady of Scotland’, was an ailing child who had never seen her kingdom. Her name, Margaret, was a name of good hope; but her age and sex aroused on every side doubts and fears. What was this kingdom like, which Alexander III – the last of his line to rule in Scotland – had governed peacefully and faithfully since ? The first thing which modern historians, especially

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English, French and American historians, have learned to say about medieval Scotland is that it was a Celtic country, part of what F. W. Maitland called the ‘Celtic Fringe’ of the British Isles. This emphasis on the Celtic quality of Scotland, a standard feature of modern books, derives not from Scottish historians as a whole but from a line of scholars whose chief founder and greatest figure was William Forbes Skene. Skene revolutionized the writing of Scottish history by a brilliant book which he called quite deliberately Celtic Scotland. Since Skene it has been impossible for serious historians to ignore the importance of the Celtic element in medieval Scottish society. But it is a century and a half since Skene wrote, and in the interval the sharply drawn simplicities of Skene’s view have yielded to a subtler and more complex picture. The notion of ‘Celtic Scotland’ has taken hold more powerfully outside Scotland than among the Scots themselves. For some French historians the highlands begin at the English border; and in the view of some English and American writers the clan system was universal from Berwick to Cape Wrath. Alexander III’s kingdom was indeed a Celtic country, but saying that does not explain everything in thirteenth-century Scotland. Politically and constitutionally it explains few of the important things. Our picture of medieval Scotland will be false if we overlook or underestimate its non-Celtic elements. Nevertheless, the Celtic features of Scotland were deeply embedded in its social structure, its language and its customs, and it is well worth considering some of those features here. In undisputed first rank among the nobility were the earls, about thirteen in all, and their special authority and dignity were directly inherited from the Celtic kingdom of the eleventh century. Their acknowledged doyen was the earl of Fife, whose hereditary privilege it was to place a new king upon the seat of royalty at his inauguration. Although the French and English words comte and earl were applied to them, the Scottish earls were successors of the mormaers – literally, ‘great officers’ – who had been primarily provincial governors and military commanders. In this they may have resembled the earls of pre-Conquest England, but they were unlike their counterparts in Angevin England, who were essentially great landowners, lords of vast feudal estates, on whom the title of earl had been bestowed as no more than a mark of special

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honour. There was no one in Scotland to compare with the English earl of Oxford, whose territory was in Essex and Suffolk, the earl of Albemarle, who would be found in Holderness, or the earl of Surrey, whose lands lay in Sussex, Norfolk and Yorkshire. In Scotland the arrangement was more primitive and logical: the earl of Atholl, for instance, had his chief seat at Moulin (near Pitlochry), most of his lands were in the surrounding district, and, although he was a landowner in Aberdeenshire, it was only in Atholl that, as earl, he wielded appreciable political and military authority. The earls had the power to muster the ‘common army’ of Scotland within their own provinces; they wielded a jurisdiction in their own courts which fell only just short of the Crown’s; and they laid claim to illdefined rights in the matter of choosing a new sovereign whenever the king died. Many other pieces of Celtic conservatism survived north of Forth and in the south-west, where Galloway had its own special laws, including the archaic system of the wergild or blood-price. In these regions, for example, there were at every court to which free men resorted certain judges, ‘doomsmen’, ‘dempsters’, ‘breitheamhnan’, sometimes hereditary, who served as repositories of unrecorded, immemorial law and custom. Much the same had been true of the Scandinavian parts of England before , but a great deal had happened in England in the intervening two centuries, nowhere more than in the field of law. In this as in many other ways Scotland had remained more conservative. The English historians who for ‘conservative’ tend to write ‘backward’ tend also in this context to forget that England was conquered by a Norman ruling class who monopolised control at the top and eventually brought the country they had captured into a vast trans-Channel empire. It is not surprising that the England of Edward I was very different from the England of Edward the Confessor. Scotland, on the other hand, had had a half-hearted ‘Norman Conquest’ and was never joined to the continent. At almost every point development was slower and more gradual than in the south and began from different origins. The most obvious way in which Celtic influence survived in Alexander III’s kingdom was in language and social custom, especially in the matter of family relationships. In  Gaelic had not

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been driven back within the highland line: it must still have been the language of the great majority of the peasantry north of Forth and Clyde, as well as in Galloway. No doubt it also survived among the gentry of these regions, but in the lowlands at least (with the probable exception of Buchan) the greater lords and the educated clergy would speak French or northern English, and there is little doubt that English and French prevailed almost exclusively in the towns. Even if Gaelic-speaking gentry survived in the northeastern lowlands they would certainly have been in a minority. By  many families of ‘Norman’ or English origin had won lands in the north, and all our evidence shows that outside the highlands these new settlers used the English tongue, with perhaps a smattering of French. Yet they found Celtic custom tenacious, and in their attitude to the family they surely came under its influence. It is true that the succession of heirs by primogeniture, unknown in Celtic lands, was imported into Scotland in the twelfth century and was accepted by the entire landowning class, Normans, English and native Scots alike. But the clannishness deep-rooted among the Celts can be seen in the mixed post-Celtic society of the thirteenth century and was to emerge very strongly in later medieval Scotland. The ‘clan system’ is one of the myths of Scottish history, but in the thirteenth century there were undoubtedly clans in the more purely Celtic parts of the country – the west highlands and Galloway – and traces of clan organization can be found elsewhere. More important than any ‘clan system’, with all its picturesque accompaniment of slogans, badges and tartans, was the indisputable fact that the family as a whole, rather than any single father-to-son dynasty, was the dominant social unit in Scotland. Even allowing for the small population, a remarkably small number of surnames sufficed for the landowning class. The Scots, in short, were a kin-based society. Down to this point the written records give us clear evidence. They fail us almost completely when we seek the richer and more colourful texture of daily life, its dress, its sports and pastimes, its worship, the books read by the educated, the tales listened to in ale-houses, the gossip of the village. Yet even here we can feel sure, without being able to prove, that Scottish society in lowlands and highlands alike retained a Celtic flavour. There was something of a conscious revival of things Celtic in the middle of the thirteenth

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century, which went hand in hand with an attempt to give a distinctive personality to the Scottish kingdom and nation. The name Scotia, the land of the Scots, which a hundred years earlier had been confined to the country north of Forth, was now applied to the whole Scottish kingdom. At the same time old chronicles and genealogies were studied in an effort to write an intelligible, acceptable history of the Scots which could compare with the better-known, more firmly established histories of neighbouring nations. To make a nation conscious of its identity you must first give it a history. Before the thirteenth century the Scottish nation had meant the people of mixed Scottish and Pictish descent who lived north of Forth and Clyde. ‘Histories’ of this nation, such as they were, related to the Scots of the west and, to a noticeably lesser degree, to the Picts of the east. In the thirteenth century, therefore, the only available histories (apart from chronicles of the recent past) which were in any way suitable for the Scottish kingdom as a whole were Celtic histories, the deeds and feuds and sometimes doubtful genealogies of long lines of kings with names which even then must have seemed uncouth and improbable. To make up for this there was the splendid if partly obscure story of the Scottish church, the great antiquity of the Christian faith in Scotland, the lives of innumerable saints, the undeniable fact that of all the missionaries who had tried to convert the English people the Scots of Iona had had the most resounding success, and the more questionable assumption that the Scots nation of the thirteenth century was the sole heir of this Columban tradition. Scotsmen of Alexander III’s time might be of Pictish, British, Gaelic, Scandinavian, English, Flemish or Norman descent. However inappropriate, however ironical it might seem, they all took a pride in the Celtic past of their country. At the inauguration of Alexander III, which, by a custom already very ancient in , was celebrated at Scone, an aged highland shennachie recited the young king’s genealogy in Gaelic: ‘God’s blessing on the king of Scotland, Alexander mac Alexander mac William mac Henry mac David,’ and so on, till he reached the first Scotsman, Iber Scot.1 The string of non-Celtic Christian names separated by the reiterated mac merely serves to emphasize that the old man was rehearsing not only the antiquity but also the Celtic character of the Scottish

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monarchy. And King Alexander did not cease to be given reminders of Celtic custom after his inauguration. He kept a harper, Master Elias, who, whether or not himself a Celt, practised an art in which the Scots were acknowledged to excel.2 Music was certainly important to the Scottish court, as it doubtless was in every court of medieval Europe. In , a Scots royal minstrel travelling by way of Durham had his horses and clothing confiscated until he would agree to pay exorbitantly for his lodging.3 When the king travelled by the high road through Strathearn, it was the custom for seven women to meet him and sing before him on the way, an entertainment that seems quite in keeping with the progress of a Celtic chief, and far removed from the world of the Capetians and Plantagenets.4 It was a nagging reminder of Celtic habits of thought which occupied King Alexander on the day of his death. Over fifty years earlier a bastard son of Alan, lord of Galloway, by name Thomas, had been chosen as their chief by the Celtic people of that province, rather than see their land divided among Alan’s three daughters and their English husbands. King Alexander’s father, Alexander II, put down the Gallovidian revolt with great severity, and the bastard Thomas was shut up in Barnard Castle, in charge of John Balliol, who had married Thomas’s second half-sister, Dervorguilla. Now, in , John Balliol’s son and successor, another John, wished to release Thomas from his long imprisonment, and sought the king of Scots’ permission to restore him to his native land. It was this request which came before Alexander III’s council at Edinburgh on  March.5 If Thomas of Galloway seemed like a ghost from the distant past, his case illustrated the gulf between feudal society, which rigidly excluded bastards from inheritance, and Celtic society, which might prefer a man of unlawful birth to legitimate heiresses. If Scotland was thus a Celtic country, it was also a country of non-Celtic developments and anti-Celtic tendencies. It is one of the startling paradoxes of Scottish history that the thirteenth century saw not only the first emergence of ‘Scotland’ in a modern sense but also the decisive defeat of the Scottish language – Gaelic – by a northern English tongue, which in the course of time coolly adopted the name ‘Scots’ for itself. This Scots language is now retreating fast, save in poetry and as the speech of country districts,

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especially in the north-east. Gaelic, though confined within an everdecreasing area, still has plenty of life left. But in the thirteenth century Scots was an aggressive tongue, slowly but surely ousting Gaelic, more than holding its own with French, confident of its future as the official and literary language of the Scottish kingdom. Why this displacement happened is not at all clear. It is true that since the tenth century there had been a sizeable population of English race and language within the Scottish kingdom, concentrated in the south-east, in Lothian, Tweeddale and Teviotdale. It cannot have remained confined to this corner of the country, and there is plenty of evidence that English-speaking people could be found in the thirteenth century in Dumfriesshire and Ayrshire, in Clydesdale, and in many parts of Scotland north of Forth. It was neither lairds nor scholars but ordinary farming and fishing folk who in the first half of the thirteenth century were giving names like ‘Whitefield’, ‘Midfield’, ‘Stanbrig’ and ‘Stinchende [Stinking] Haven’ to places in Angus and Perthshire.6 This would explain the increase of English speaking in the northern parts of Scotland but one has still to explain the fact that no contrary movement of Gaelic into the south seems to have taken place. If the king’s peace allowed Saxons to settle among Britons and Gaels, why did not the same peace allow Gaels to settle among Saxons? Perhaps the answer is to be found in the attitude of the monarchy. From David I’s time there was a growing tendency for the king to treat Edinburgh as the capital, to reside there or in other southern castles like Roxburgh and Stirling, and to hunt in the great southern forest of Selkirk (or Ettrick as it is more usually called today). Here too, in the south-east, was the biggest concentration of religious houses, including some of the most famous, Holyrood, Melrose and Kelso. Agriculturally the south-east was probably the richest and most fertile part of the kingdom, and in Stirling, Edinburgh, Roxburgh and above all Berwick it could boast towns whose equal was not to be found elsewhere in Scotland. Since the economic and political centre of gravity was located in Lothian, where a basic population of Anglian stock was ruled by lords who despite their ‘Norman’ descent were doubtless already capable of speaking English, it is not really surprising that the native language as well as the customs of Lothian were providing a model to be copied by

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the rest of Scotland, save for the far north, the west highlands and Galloway. Celtic Scotland had been rebuffed in popular devotion as well as popular speech. In ancient times the patron of the Scottish nation was Columba or Columcille of Iona, and in the thirteenth century (and for long afterwards) it was his reliquary, the Brecbennach, which was borne by the Scots army into battle. But as early as the eighth century the cult of the apostle Andrew had been established on the east coast by a Pictish king. While Iona was ravaged by the Norsemen and fell upon evil days of obscurity and decay, Saint Andrew’s shrine attracted pilgrims from Scotland, England and many other lands. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in keeping with the eastward orientation of the country, Saint Andrew, universally known and revered but also an eastern saint in an east coast setting, became the undisputed patron of the Scottish people. By the early twelfth century the locality of his shrine, Kinrymont, had changed its name simply to St Andrews. Along with Andrew, other saints who were specially revered or became widely popular in the thirteenth century either stood, like Ninian, for an anti-Columban tradition, or, like Nicholas, had distinct associations with the east -coast and North Sea. The cult of Margaret, Malcolm Canmore’s Anglo-German queen (born in Hungary), was significantly antiCeltic. She was canonized in , when her remains were translated with great ceremony at Dunfermline Abbey. By the end of the century Margaret had taken her place among the very small company of saints for whom all Scots felt love and reverence.7 It was unquestionably in the field of government and administration that the Celtic inheritance of Scotland had suffered its most permanent reverses. Royal government in the thirteenth century was based on a fairly simple structure that was imported from the feudal states of north-west Europe, especially England and France. The monarchy might be Celtic historically, possibly more Celtic in spirit than the surviving evidence would suggest, but to outward seeming there was little to distinguish it, save in opulence, from the feudal monarchies of England and France. Such central government as existed, apart from the king himself, was provided by the royal household. This was emphatically feudal, Frankish, nonCeltic in character. Its chief officers were the steward or stewart,

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the chancellor, the chamberlain, the constable, the butler and the marischal. The office of the steward had been heritable from its establishment by David I, the constable’s office had been hereditary from the same period, and there was a marked tendency for the other offices (except the chancellor’s) to become hereditary in the thirteenth century. The steward had general responsibility for the household and its management, and under him were senior clerks, of the Provend and of the Liverance, who had charge of the day-to-day running of the household. The chamberlain was primarily a financial officer, with a general oversight of the royal revenues. The functions of the constable and the marischal were chiefly military, the former being responsible for organizing the Crown’s military resources as a whole, the latter having a more specialised role in charge of the cavalry element. The chancellor presided over the king’s chapel, which in addition to being the king’s personal place of worship served as his chancery or writing – office, keeping his seals, preparing letters and other written documents and issuing legal writs or ‘brieves’. The chancellor, himself invariably a clergyman who could normally expect promotion to a bishopric at the end of his term of office, was assisted by numerous chaplains and clerks, some with specialised duties, for example, as custodian of the great seal. Besides these greater officers of the household, there were others, more or less important, more or less hereditary in character, such as the doorward (durward, hostiarius), the pantler, the foresters and hunters, and the serjeants or officers of the dispensa or spence, the sub-department of the household dealing with bread and wine. Outside the household, the earls, as we have seen, provided a remarkable example of Celtic survival; but the role assigned to them as earls in the work of royal government was relatively small. The three chief administrative and judicial officers of the Crown were the justiciar of Scotia, responsible for Scotland proper, north of Forth and Clyde, the justiciar of Lothian, whose jurisdiction covered the whole of south-east Scotland, and the justiciar of Galloway.8 The justiciars might happen to be earls, but their authority derived directly from the Crown. Below them were the sheriffs, some twenty-six in all, who were the principal royal officials in the local districts into which the kingdom was divided for the purposes of royal government.

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There was a slight tendency for the sheriff ’s office to become heritable, but under Alexander III the sheriff, whether hereditary or not, still constituted the pivot of royal administration, presiding over the court most in use by free men, collecting and accounting for royal revenue, and often having responsibility for the chief royal castle (or castles) in his own sheriffdom. The sheriff was an English import, distinctly scotticized north of the border. Another import, less specifically English, was the royal burgh, a unit at once social, economic, political, and useful for maintaining public peace. Royal burghs and their non-royal imitators became more deeply embedded in the heart of Scottish life than perhaps any other institution imported by the kings of the twelfth century. Historically speaking, Scotland has been a land of burghs rather than villages. If the lack of true villages is a Celtic legacy, the success of burghs derives directly from the virtual absence of real town life in pre-twelfth-century Scotland, and the pioneering enthusiasm and copybook methods of the first burgesses, many of them coming from England or from across the North Sea.9 Above all, Scotland was a North Sea country, looking eastward and southward to the other countries which faced the same sea and used it increasingly as the highway for their trade. However stubbornly Celtic custom might persist, Scotland under Alexander III had in some ways turned its back on the west and the Celtic past. There were, it is true, sea-port towns on the west coast, Renfrew, Glasgow, Rutherglen, Irvine, Ayr and Dumfries, carrying on trade with Ireland and western England, but much the larger number of rich and thriving burghs were on or near the east coast. Of these, a distinct northern group included Inverness, Elgin and Aberdeen. In the central group, the chief towns were Perth – then more of a sea-port than it is today – St Andrews, Dundee and Montrose. Lastly, there was what amounted, by Scottish standards, to an ‘urban cluster’, south of the Forth. Here were Stirling, Edinburgh (with its ports of Leith and Musselburgh), Haddington, Roxburgh, Berwick and others. Insofar as it was not self-supporting, Scotland lived by exporting hides, wool, timber, and fish, and it was the trade in these goods which built up the North Sea towns. Aberdeen was as close to the Elbe as to the Thames, and closer to Norway than either.

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  They hoysed their sails on Monenday morn Wi’ a’ the speed they may; They hae landed in Noroway Upon a Wodensday.

Sir Patrick Spens, admittedly, was a sailor of exceptional skill. But it is a fact that when Alexander III’s daughter Margaret sailed to Norway to marry King Eric in , her ship left Scotland on th August and reached Bergen early on the morning of the th.10 In the eyes of the North Sea peoples Scotland was far from being remote, unknown or unprofitable. In , for example, a ship was built at Inverness for Count Hugh of St Pol, whose wife was a relative of the Scottish king. This ship, designed to transport crusaders from the Pas de Calais to the Holy Land, was so large and fine that it caught the attention of the English historian Matthew Paris.11 But the Inverness shipyards could never have built such a vessel if Count Hugh’s order had been unique. The links between Scotland and the Low Countries went back over a century and were vitally important for the Scottish economy. The vast flocks of sheep which grazed on the Southern Uplands produced fine wool which was shipped direct to Flanders from Berwick and other eastern ports. On a certain date in  Scots merchandise seized at Sluys (on its way to Bruges) realized over £, a fair sum for a presumably chance haul.12 From the time of David I Flemish immigrants had been welcome in Scotland, and under Alexander III the Flemings were almost certainly the most numerous and important among the foreign trading colonies. At Berwick they had their own headquarters or ‘factory’, the Red Hall, held directly of the Crown on condition that they would always defend it against the king of England.13 The Flemings had no monopoly of Scotland’s foreign trade, and by the end of Alexander III’s reign they may have been meeting serious competition from the Germans of the Hanse towns. Various men of Cologne, Gottschalk, Gottfried, Alexander, Ingram and James appear in Scottish record at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,14 and the merchants of Cologne, like the Flemings, had their own Berwick factory, the White Hall in the Seagait.15 A letter written eleven years after King Alexander’s death, when Scotland was under English rule, states that some merchants of L¨ubeck,

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belonging to the company of merchants of that city, owed £ in customs duty on wool and hides exported from Dundee.16 The interest of this chance statement emerges in the sequel. Only a few months after it was written, William Wallace, having driven the English out of Scotland, wrote to the mayors of L¨ubeck and Hamburg explaining that his country had been liberated and that the Scottish ports were once more open to German traders.17 German commercial activity in Scotland was certainly not the creation of either Edward I or Wallace: we can be sure that before  it had come to play an essential part in the country’s economy. Apart from trade, royal marriages are a good index of a medieval country’s external relations. Since , the Scottish royal family had given brides to Brittany, Holland, England and Norway, and had taken brides from England, France, especially north-eastern France, and Flanders. Denmark, in fact, is the sole country bordering the North Sea with which Scottish connections in this period are difficult or impossible to trace. Political bonds, admittedly, are seldom exactly the same as the ties of trade, and it was an obvious necessity for Scotland to keep on good terms with England, not only its closest neighbour but also the only country in a position to inflict serious injury upon it. (As the English barons are reported to have said in , their nation was powerful enough to wipe out the people of Scotland without the help of others.18 ) But it would be a mistake to think that Scotland’s relations with England, political, cultural and economic, were the only ones that mattered to it, or that it counted in any way upon English protection and patronage. Enjoying no special favours, hampered by no special prejudices or hostility, the Scots of the thirteenth century were accustomed to earning their own living and making their own way in the community of North Sea peoples. If we except the northern isles of Orkney and Shetland, Britain in  acknowledged two sovereignties – that of the king of England, representing a Saxon monarchy of Wessex which had extended its power northward, and that of the king of Scotland, representing a Pictish monarchy of the Tay Valley which had extended its power southward. Only twenty years before there had been a third sovereignty, that of the king of Norway, which made ‘foreign territory’ of the whole north-western seaboard of Britain from the

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Calf of Man to the Butt of Lewis. It was not the king of England but the king of Scotland who had annexed this Norwegian province and brought it under his rule. This had been a personal triumph for the young Alexander III in , when Norwegian plenipotentiaries had come to Perth to put their seals to a treaty which gave up the Hebrides. But it was more than a personal triumph: it was the first notable alteration in the balance of power in the British Isles since the reign of Henry II, who had won back the north of England from the Scots and had taken the lordship of Ireland. Since England remained by far the wealthier country, the more homogeneous nation, the more experienced in war, surely it would be absurd to suppose that Alexander III’s acquisition of Man and the Isles made one jot of difference to English strength? It may be doubted whether contemporaries saw things in this light. Englishmen of Edward I’s time, certainly less aware than we are of the great disparity of wealth between the two countries, knew only that the king of Scots had at last rid his government of its biggest single source of weakness and had become master of an island which lay only thirty miles from England, fifty from Wales, and athwart one of the principal routes to Ireland. In so doing he had added to his fighting strength an unknown number of islesmen bred to the art of sea-warfare and sea-raiding. It is of course an over-simplification and an anachronism to speak of two ‘sovereignties’ partitioning Britain in . Not only would the vaguer ‘overlordship’ be more accurate than ‘sovereignty’, but we must recognize that the English Crown nursed ancient claims to a ‘super overlordship’ over Scotland. This was in no way comparable to the harmless eccentricity of later English sovereigns in using the title ‘king of France’. From  to  the kings of Scotland were actually or virtually vassals of the kings of England, and from  to  Scotland had been brought into formal feudal subjection by Henry II. It is true that in  relations were as formally restored to what they had been in the time of King Malcolm IV of Scotland (–) but precisely what these relations were was something which had never been defined. In consequence, the thirteenth-century kings of England, John, Henry III and Edward I, did not always behave as though they recognized the political independence of Scotland. When the Scots kings tried to

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get the pope’s sanction for the rite of anointing in their inauguration ceremonies, the English kings lobbied successfully at the papal curia to prevent it.19 If they married English princesses, the English kings made this a pretext for interference north of the border. When the papacy decreed that a tax should be levied to support the crusade, it seemed normal to the English kings that they should be given the right to use the proceeds of this tax from Scotland as well as England, Wales and Ireland.20 At each change of tenure in the English throne, it was usual for the king of Scotland to do homage to the new king of England. Since homage was never performed in the opposite direction, the English kings naturally regarded this usage as evidence of their feudal superiority. The practice may indeed have originated in Scottish admission of some degree of feudal dependence, but it is clear that from the time of David I the Scots kings wished to keep this so vague as to be meaningless, and that Alexander III denied it altogether. ‘I become your man,’ he declared to King Edward I at Westminster on  October , ‘for the lands which I hold of you in the kingdom of England for which I owe homage, saving my kingdom.’ The bishop of Norwich, William Middleton – an experienced canon lawyer – intervened, saying ‘And be it saved to the king of England if he have a right to homage for it.’ Which gave Alexander the opportunity to reply, speaking clearly, ‘No one has a right to homage for my kingdom of Scotland save God alone, and I hold it only of God.’21 This account of King Alexander’s homage comes only from a Scottish source, but even if partisan it may be well founded. It was copied, c. –, into the cartulary of Dunfermline Abbey by a scribe who has copied beside it two documents of Ralph of Greenlaw, abbot of Dunfermline from  to , and we know that Abbot Ralph was one of those commissioned in  to make an inventory of the royal archives in Edinburgh Castle.22 At the Roxburgh council held on  October , just before Alexander set off for Worcester, Tewkesbury and eventually Westminster, a royal letter was sealed in favour of Dunfermline Abbey.23 Moreover, there is good evidence that King Edward employed the bishop of Norwich in confidential negotiations regarding the king of Scots’ homage a few months after the ceremony on  October, for in February  the English king sent letters-close to William Middleton, then on

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his way to the Scottish court, commanding him to enquire into the homage and attendant circumstances ‘in as careful and confidential a manner as possible’, but to attempt nothing without the king’s special command.24 Clearly King Edward took the matter seriously and had not got his own way – and indeed the much more guarded official English version of what took place might suggest as much.25 This personal declaration of independence was no mere posturing. King Alexander was the child of a marriage which had itself been a gesture of independence. His father’s first wife, Joan of England, had been Henry III’s sister. She had represented friendship with England, but also, unmistakably, the maintenance of the old tradition of Scottish dependence on England. She bore Alexander II no children, and after her death in  he looked in a different direction for his second wife. On Whit Sunday , at Roxburgh, Alexander was married to Marie de Couci, elder daughter of Enguerand, lord of Couci and peer of France, a greatgrandson of King Louis VI. The marriage inevitably substituted French for English influence at the Scottish court. Couci adjoins the Vermandois and is not far from Vermand, and when in the year of the Couci marriage we find Master Richard ‘Veirement’, or ‘Verment’, acting for the king of Scots and a few years later holding the office of chancellor to the queen,26 it is tempting to see in this man, who was prominent in the Scottish church for thirty years, a favoured dependant of the Couci family. Queen Marie’s younger sister, Alice, married the count of Guines, in the Pas de Calais. Like their neighbour the count of St Pol, who had ordered his crusading ship from Inverness, the counts of Guines were not only near to England, they earned a useful income supplying the English king with mercenary troops. Their fief of Guines, feudally dependent on Flanders, was one of those North Sea territories with which it was natural for Scotland also to have connections. The Countess Alice’s younger son, Enguerand de Guines, went off to seek his fortune in Scotland, where his cousin, the young Alexander III, had become king in  after his father’s unexpected death. Enguerand found favour in his cousin’s sight.27 He was knighted, and the marriage arranged for him by the king made him one of the foremost barons of the realm. His wife, Christian Lindsay, was heiress of the main stem of the great house of Lindsay, which held large estates in the

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south of Scotland, especially in Clydesdale, and a good deal of land in England also.28 In right of his lordship, Enguerand de Guines took his place among the earls and barons of Scotland on the major political occasions of the period – the recognition of the Maid of Norway as heir to the throne in ,29 and the Treaty of Birgham of .30 But he belonged to a family which had a long tradition of friendship with the king of England, and with the outbreak of war between the Scots and Edward I it is not surprising to find Enguerand taking the English part. In , somewhat unexpectedly, he succeeded to the lordship of Couci, and about this time, less unexpectedly, his great Scottish estates were judged forfeit by King Robert I. The story of Enguerand de Guines is perhaps a little untypical, but it shows that we must at least distinguish as carefully as possible between nobles who were genuinely Scottish and those, like Enguerand de Guines, whose ‘Scottishness’ was a technicality. Alexander III’s marriages followed the same pattern as his father’s. His first wife was Henry III’s daughter, Margaret. Bride and bridegroom, the one eleven years old, the other a few months younger, were strictly subordinated to political necessity, in other words the desire of Henry III to have some say in Scottish affairs. This desire was first clearly expressed in the Anglo-Scottish crisis of , and was a continuous factor in Scottish politics from the time of the young Alexander’s wedding in  until , when a revolution in England ruled out, for the time being, any thought of an aggressive policy towards the Scots. Margaret of England, always the object of her father’s love and anxiety, recovered from the acute misery of her early days in Scotland, when she had felt herself to be imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, that ‘dreary and solitary place’.31 She bore her husband three children and died in . Ten years passed before the tragically early death of all his children forced the king of Scots to marry again. So we are brought back to Queen Yolande, her marriage to Alexander on All Saints’ Day , and the ill-fated ride to Kinghorn five months later. Yolande of Dreux, like Marie de Couci, belonged to one of the great noble families of France; indeed, both were descended from Count Robert I of Dreux, a son of King Louis VI. Had Alexander III lived, this second French marriage might well have seen a second

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influx of Frenchmen into Scotland and a strong revival of French influence. Instead there followed only disaster and uncertainty. As things stood, the acknowledged heir to the throne was Margaret of Norway. But it was rumoured that the queen was pregnant. Should she give birth to a son, the magnates would be forced to set aside Margaret’s claims in his favour. One contemporary chronicler, whose writing is too deeply imbued with a pathological misogyny to be trusted on such a point, says that for several months Yolande deliberately pretended to be pregnant, with the intention of passing off an unknown baby as the late king’s son.32 In the meantime, the peace of the kingdom must be maintained, law administered, justice done. The great men of the land, the bishops, abbots and priors, the earls and barons, assembled at Scone about  April .33 No doubt it was at this ‘parliament’, and not at the king’s funeral a month before, that the magnates swore fealty to their lady, the king of Norway’s daughter, and took a solemn oath, on pain of excommunication by the bishops, to guard and preserve for her the land of Scotland and to keep the peace of her land.34 In accordance with the oath, the main business of the Scone assembly was the setting up of a provisional government.35 The decisions taken, which were both careful and astute, make nonsense of any belief that after King Alexander’s death Scotland disintegrated into anarchy. The realm was to be governed by six custodes, ‘wardens’ or (as it is usual to call them nowadays) ‘Guardians’. This body was made up of two representatives of the earls, Alexander Comyn of Buchan and Duncan of Fife, two representatives of the bishops, William Fraser of St Andrews and Robert Wishart of Glasgow, and two representatives of the barons, John Comyn of Badenoch and James the Stewart. Not only was this division very much in keeping with thirteenth-century constitutional ideas, it also met the problem posed by the traditional division of the kingdom, since the first three magnates named above had special responsibility for the older ‘Scotia’, Scotland north of Forth, and the other three had similar responsibility for the south.36 In electing Duncan of Fife, a young and inexperienced man, the assembly was really acknowledging the seniority of his earldom; in electing the Stewart it took into account the century-old primacy of the stewardship among the household offices. It appointed the two leading prelates of the

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B'Bridge Calf of Man

B

. Scotland –; physical features and communications.

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Scottish church, and its choice of the two Comyns recognized the enormous influence of the most powerful baronial family in the land. Constitutionally impeccable, the election was also politically prudent. If the Maid of Norway should die and Queen Yolande not bear a child, the throne would be open to competition from a number of claimants. Of these the two strongest would be Robert Bruce, lord of Annandale, and John Balliol of Barnard Castle. It was clearly unwise to make either of these men a Guardian, but Bishop Fraser and the two Comyns supported Balliol (whose sister was John Comyn’s wife), while Bishop Wishart, the Stewart, and, probably, Earl Duncan were supporters of Bruce. According to a report preserved by Walter Bower, the Scone parliament appointed three envoys (the bishop of Brechin, the abbot of Jedburgh and Sir Geoffrey de Moubray37 ) to seek out Edward I in Gascony and ask for his advice and protection with regard to the Scottish kingdom and the Liberty of Penrith. The envoys set off on  August, found the English king at Saintes, and on  November, at Clackmannan, reported back to the Guardians, whom they found dealing with the difficult and delicate problem of the pregnancy of Queen Yolande, then lodged in Stirling Castle.38 Ignored by most if not all modern historians, this high-powered mission in the summer of  shows that the Scots leaders were anxious from the outset of the Maid’s minority to enlist Edward I’s support. But it tells against any notion that they were ready to concede, or Edward to demand, superior lordship over Scotland. The situation which faced the Guardians was full of dangers and difficulty. Scotland was a feudal kingdom and its people were feudally minded. The members of the ruling class were bound closely to the Crown by social custom and the obligations of military service in virtue of which they held their land. A great deal of land, indeed most of the more fertile land, was held by knight-service and organized into baronies and knights’ fees. The majority of the men so holding were men of fairly small substance, perhaps tenants-inchief, more often freemen who held their estates of one or other of the great magnates. Whether tenants-in-chief or sub-tenants, many were holders of only single knight’s fees or less. As such they were not separated from the peasantry, townsmen or lesser freemen of the countryside by any unbridgeable gulf, though in

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Scotland the fundamental medieval class distinction between noble and non-noble birth and rank was clearly understood. The Crown acted as the linchpin of this small society of men who were free and self-sufficient, yet at the same time feudally very conservative. Nothing and no one could be an adequate substitute for the king. If for some compelling reason the throne must be left vacant, the kingdom could only resolve itself into a collective entity, into the universality of its freemen, or, in thirteenth-century language, into the ‘community of the realm of Scotland’ (communitas regni Scotie). Of course there was such a ‘community’ even when a king was on the throne, but in normal times, with an adult and vigorous ruler, the community would fade into the background. The king would take the initiative, would act or give orders as he thought best. In serious matters he would naturally take the advice of his council; but this council, in the theory of the time, was no other than a representation of the wider community. Ideas of this sort had already been adumbrated in  and now on Alexander III’s death they sprang at once to the forefront. The Guardians invariably styled themselves ‘appointed by common counsel’ or ‘elected by the community of the realm’.39 The symbol of all government, the essential mark of authority, was the seal. The Guardians had a remarkable seal cut for their use, showing on one side a shield of the royal arms, on the other the figure of Saint Andrew on his cross.40 The background or ‘field’ of these emblems, evenly sown with trefoils, repeated the design of the late king’s seal and emphasized continuity with the immediate past. The seal bore two significant inscriptions, the first descriptive, the second emotional: ‘the seal of Scotland appointed for the government of the kingdom’ and ‘Saint Andrew be leader of the compatriot Scots’.41 While thus expressing the idea of the community of the realm, the Guardians were also at pains to appear as delegates or trustees of the Crown and the young queen. This we can most clearly see if we look forward a few years to the Treaty of Birgham ( July ), entered into between Edward I and the community of the realm of Scotland led by the Guardians.42 In this it was provided that once the Maid of Norway was made queen in the accustomed manner a seal should be cut for her with the usual arms and inscription of the name of the king of Scotland only. All relics, charters, privileges

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and muniments touching the Scottish ‘royal dignity’ and kingship were to be guarded securely within the realm of Scotland until the queen should have an heir, and in the meantime nothing pertaining to the ‘royal dignity’ was to be alienated or placed under subjection. But the Guardians’ care for the rights and duties of the Crown had shown itself much earlier than this, especially in keeping the peace and in the defence of the realm, royal tasks par excellence. For example, James the Stewart, one of the Guardians, declared that public necessity had forced him to override Melrose Abbey’s exemption from wapinschaws (inspection of weapons) and military aid in Kyle ‘because the peace and tranquillity of the realm were disturbed after King Alexander’s death and the state was threatened by conflict’.43 This must have been in line with a general instruction, for before Whitsun ( May) , Earl Malise of Strathearn had raised men from among the tenants of Inchaffray Abbey ‘to uphold the peace and tranquillity of the realm of Scotland’.44 A writ preserved only in a later formulary possibly gives the gist of peace-keeping orders sent out at this time by the Guardians.45 In  the gravest threat to the peace of Scotland came from Scotsmen, especially in the south-west, where it so happened that the two noblemen with the strongest claims to the throne, Balliol and Bruce, were both very powerful. Robert Bruce, lord of Annandale, and his son Robert, who held the earldom of Carrick in right of his wife Marjorie, gathered an armed force and seized the royal castles of Dumfries and Wigtown, and the lord of Galloway’s castle at Buittle.46 The revolt can only have been meant to strengthen the Bruce position vis-`a-vis John Balliol, whose mother’s lordship of Galloway – Wigtownshire and Kirkcudbright – was already hedged in by Bruce the elder in Annandale and Bruce the younger in Carrick, and stood to be encircled completely if the Bruces controlled Dumfries and the road north through Nithsdale. It has even been argued that when on  September  at Turnberry (the chief castle of Carrick) the Bruces, James the Stewart, two Scottish earls, the lord of Islay and several dependants entered into a ‘band’ or sworn agreement to support the earl of Ulster and Thomas de Clare against their adversaries, Bruce the elder made this the occasion of a deliberate claim to the Crown.47 But the band merely saves the fealty of all parties to the king of England and to that

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