After the departure of his brother to Scotland in May 1317, Edward Bruce, who could never stay still, became involved in the politics and skirmishes of petty Irish chieftains in an attempt to rally them under his royal standard.
His efforts were understandable. By the close of 1316 the English had realized that they must regain control of the Irish seas and cut his lifeline to Scotland. Additional ships were commissioned in December 13161 and May 13172 to join the fleet at Dublin, and on 13 July 1317 Sir John Athy, with a strengthened naval force, captured Thomas Dun, the Scottish admiral, worsted his ships and destroyed the ascendancy of the Scots.3 Reinforcements to Edward Bruce could no longer be assured. Local support had become increasingly important.
He was helped in obtaining this by the Minorite Friars and other religious orders whose activities in the cause of Irish independence played somewhat the same part as their brethren in Scotland.4 To harness still further the patriotic devotion of the Church, Donald O’Neill in December 1317 sent a remonstrance to the Holy See. Styling himself ‘King of Ulster and true heir by heritable right to all Ireland’, he touched on the evil practices of the English who counted the death of a dog as of more importance than that of an Irishman, and declared that since the Kings of Scotland derived their blood from that of Ireland he was willing to renounce his right to the throne in favour of Edward Bruce, ‘a pious, prudent and modest man of ancient Irish descent, powerful enough to redeem the Irish from their house of bondage’.5
Few adjectives could be less applicable to Edward Bruce, as he was to demonstrate in his last campaign. In October 1318, when his horses and men were in prime condition after the harvest, he set out with two thousand Scotsmen and a number of native Irish to attack Dundalk. Newly arrived reinforcements from his brother were to follow. On hearing of his approach, Richard Clare, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, gathered together a force of armed knights many times greater and took up his position across the route to the town.
Edward Bruce had arranged his men in three columns – vanguard, mainguard and rearguard – but had briefed them so badly that none kept contact with their following body. They were strung out at such a distance that the first column was annihilated before the second came up, and then the second before the third.6
Edward was in command of the third. He had sent before him as scouts three veteran soldiers: Sir John Soulis, Sir Philip Mowbray and Sir John Stewart. When they saw what had happened to the first two columns and the greatly superior force of English, they advised their commander to turn back. Edward angrily replied that he would fight were the enemy three times as many.
‘My brother is near at hand with fifteen hundred men,’ said Sir John Stewart, ‘let us not fight in such haste’, and all three begged Edward to wait for their arrival. The Irish chiefs offered to delay the advance of the English by sending their men on a series of hit and run attacks until Stewart’s brother arrived, but were not prepared to take part in an immediate set battle while the Scottish numbers were inferior. But Edward Bruce would listen to no reason. Headstrong as ever, he flew into a rage and swore that no man, while he lived, should ever say that an enemy had made him give way.
To this the Irish coldly replied that in that case they would withdraw their forces and watch the battle from afar. But his three knights, true to their code, answered ‘So be it then, we shall take what God sends’, and went to arm.
Edward, with a belated onset of self-preservation, dressed as a simple knight. His royal coat of armour he gave to Gib Harper, a stalwart warrior from his estate. But it was of no avail. At the first onslaught the pitiful handful of Scots were overwhelmed. Edward Bruce was cut down by Sir John Bermingham. Sir John Soulis, Sir John Stewart and Gib Harper were slain. Sir Philip Mowbray fell stunned to the ground but, recovering his senses as he was being dragged away by two of the enemy, broke free and managed to join John Thomson, leader of the men of Carrick, who was retreating with his contingent towards the troops of an Irish chief of his acquaintance. There they were received loyally into safety and made their way back to Carrickfergus.
The English searched among the dead for Edward Bruce. Finding Gib Harper in resplendent mail, they thought he was his master. Showing little regard for the manners of chivalry which distinguished Robert Bruce after Bannock burn, they quartered his body for public display throughout Ireland. His head was cut off and salted in a bucket and in due course was presented by Sir John Bermingham to Edward II. In reward he was created Earl of Louth.7
The death of Edward Bruce ended the attempt by the Scots to establish a sister regime in Ireland. But their invasion had to a large extent achieved the object of Bruce’s strategy. The authority of the English government had been shattered. Throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages it shrunk within the confines of the Pale. The greater part of the island reverted to its customary chaos of feuding kinglets. Never again could it be used by the English as a base from which to mount an attack on the western seaboard of Scotland.
Edward Bruce had died without legitimate issue and thereby rendered irrelevant the 1315 settlement of succession. Accordingly, at a parliament assembled at Scone in December 1318, a fresh act was passed settling the crown, in the event of the King having no legitimate male heir, on his infant grandson Robert Stewart with Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, again to be regent and after him Sir James Douglas.8
Much other legislation was enacted at this parliament, some of it recapitulation of ancient laws for the protection of the Church, equal justice to rich and poor and a close season for salmon; but the majority were innovating reforms for the security of tenants and freeholders, the rights of inheritance and especially for the calling up and administration of the armed forces.
Robert Bruce, with his experience of both English and Scottish armies, his grasp of strategic and tactical considerations and his awareness of the relative poverty of his country, realized that his military organization must differ from that of England. In broad terms the English relied on paid foot soldiers and bowmen and a heavily armed cavalry provided partly from the feudal service of magnates but increasingly in return for pay. Scotland could not afford a paid army nor obtain from knight service a cavalry of comparable weight. The main deployment of her military must be on foot.
Bruce maintained the feudal principle of armed service but shifted the emphasis. As early as 1309, when granting or regranting tenure, he required from the lessee, instead of the provision of one knight the provision of ten archers, and continued in this manner in varying degrees from that time on. Unlike the French, whose lack of comprehension caused them to suffer the devastating defeats of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, he understood the efficacy of the long distance weapon.
For his hand-to-hand fighters he made sure of a national reserve by ordaining in the statutes of the 1318 Parliament that every layman possessing £10 in goods must provide himself with a padded leather jerkin, steel helmet and gloves of plate, and that small folk having in goods the value of a cow must own a good spear or a good bow and a sheaf of arrows. It was made incumbent on sheriffs to carry out inspections and, if this law had not been obeyed, to deprive the culprit of his saleable goods and hand the proceeds half to the king and half to his lawful superior.9
Determined to knit the whole community together in defence of the country, and knowing too well the disaccord which can arise between civilians and military from the commandeering habits of the latter, he laid down that all leaders bringing their men to the assembly point of the army should bring adequate provision with them or money to pay for it. This attention to martial matters was soon to be justified.
The quarrel between Edward II and the Earl of Lancaster, which in the last two years had almost brought civil war to England, had by August 1318 been patched up by the Earl of Pembroke. An uneasy kiss of peace had been exchanged between the two opponents on a bridge over the River Soare near Loughborough. But the more compelling impulsion to harmony was the loss of Berwick to the Scots. The national prestige was at stake. By June 1319 the forces of King and earl had joined muster at Newcastle, and from there with 12,000 men Edward II marched on Berwick, leaving his Queen Isabella at York.
Every English baron of note had been summoned to join in the assault, and as they came up were allotted their own section opposite the walls of the town so that the whole landward side between the Tweed and the sea was surrounded by a multitude of men, horses, stores, siege engines and tents to form a city greater than Berwick itself. Outside this broad ribbon of besiegers was laid out a defensive system of trenches and earthen ramparts to block a relieving force, and in the estuary of the river an English fleet lay anchored. When all these precautions had been taken, a detailed plan of attack was prepared. Each baron was appointed a place where he should strike. His men were provided with scaling ladders and scaffolding. Companies of archers were allotted to give covering fire and sappers with pickaxes to undermine the walls.
Early on the morning of 7 September the English trumpets sounded and a general assault began from the landward side. Although the battlements were as yet little more than a spear’s length in height, the defenders throughout the day held their own, hurling down the scaling ladders and directing their catapults with deadly effect on the massed enemy below. Walter Stewart with a troop of reserves rode from place to place to see where help was needed, dropping off men to fill the gaps where the enemy pressed hardest. Meanwhile, at noon when the tide was full, the English ships came up the river. The leading ship had been so prepared that her boat, filled with armed men, had been drawn halfway up the mast with a bridge of planks to let fall from the boat to the battlement. But she failed to get close enough for the fall bridge to reach it and was left stranded by the ebbing tide. At which the defenders made a sally, set fire to the ship, killed some and captured others, among them an engineer famous for his skill.
All day the struggle continued without the English achieving a breakthrough, and when evening came they sounded the retreat and retired to their quarters.10
For the next five days, within eyesight of each other, the two sides prepared themselves for the next assault. The English constructed a huge machine on wheels, roofed with strong planks to contain beneath its canopy sappers to undermine the walls and armed men to burst through the breach when it had been made. Because of its shape it was called a ‘sow’. At the same time a number of ships were fitted out in the same manner as that which had been burnt but with strengthened topcastles to be filled with archers. Under the deadly discharge of their arrows, men would drag the vessels across the narrow strip of shallow water which separated the river from the walls and allow the drawbridge to rest upon the parapet.
The Scotsmen, under the direction of John Crab, wheeled the huge catapult he had built into position opposite the sow, and next to it a movable crane against which were stacked bundles of faggots mixed with pitch and tar, bound like casks in bands of iron.
At dawn on 13 September the English once more assailed the town. Under a hail of arrows, the foot soldiers advanced with their scaling ladders while others slowly pushed the sow towards the wall. The English engineer who had been captured was brought to the spot and threatened that if he failed to shatter her to pieces he would surely die. In fear for his life he manned the catapult and, aiming, pulled the trigger. The first stone went straight over the sow and fell behind her. The second flew forth ‘with a whizz and a roar’ but landed close in front.
For the third time the engineer bent over his catapult and aimed. This time the huge stone went straight to the sky and then, plunging down, crashed through the roof of the sow, shattering the main beam in its descent. As the men inside crawled from the debris a shout went up from the Scotsmen that ‘the sow has farrowed’. John Crab let grappling irons down from his crane to hold the sow in place, and then lit his bundled faggots and, swinging them over the wall, burned it to ashes.
With the tide flowing, the English ships were once more making towards the town. The engineer and catapult were hurried to the seaward side and he was warned again, on pain of death, to show his skill. This time at the first shot he landed a stone in the hoisted boat of the leading ship and the men were thrown out turning over and over in the air, some stunned and some dead. No other vessel then dared approach.
But on the landward side the attack still continued with the losses mounting and the women and little children taking over from the fallen, gathering up arrows in armfuls and carrying them to the men on the walls. Walter Stewart, riding inside the battlements with a hundred armed men, found so many places where the defenders were dead or badly wounded that by the time he had made the circuit and filled the gaps, he had but one man left. It was at this moment the news was brought him that the English had stormed the outworks of the Marygate and set the gate on fire. Having no men spare from the fighting on the walls, he called out the garrison of the castle, the last defence if the town fell and, flinging open the gate from within, drove the attackers back and, after stamping out the fire, held the entrance until the enemy withdrew. So for the second time night fell with Berwick unsubdued.11
Robert Bruce had taken the measure of his opponents. He would relieve the town but he had neither the army nor the intention to try to break through the entrenchments the English had so painfully created to guard themselves against his attack. By concentrating on Berwick they had left the whole of the hinterland unprotected. He conceived the daring project of seizing the Queen of England from her residence near York and, with her as hostage, dictating the terms of peace.
A flying column under Douglas and Randolph was sent posthaste to Boroughbridge to link with Scottish agents in the city of York. By ill luck one of these was apprehended and under torture revealed the plot. When the archbishop was advised of his story, he could scarcely believe that the two most famous warriors of Scotland would have come a hundred miles out of their country when the English were on the doorstep. But the spy swore that he would lay his head on the block if his report was proved untrue.12
The Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Ely gathered together a great concourse of citizens and yeomen, priests, clerks, monks and friars to bring the Queen into the city, and from there despatched her by water to Nottingham. On the next day, having been told that the Scots were few in numbers and hidden in a wood near Milton,13 some twelve miles north of York where the Swale joins the Ouse, the archbishop decided to attack them, and with his motley following set out at a leisurely pace in that direction. After pausing for their dinner, which the archbishop had served on silver plate, they began to cross the bridge that spans the Swale.
‘As men unskilled in war,’ says the Lanercost Chronicle, ‘they marched all scattered through the fields and in no kind array.’14 The Scots when they saw them coming set fire to a large amount of hay which had been gathered there, and in the drifting smoke their enemies lost all coherence.15 As the smoke cleared, the English saw the Scots drawn up in a single schiltron which advanced towards them with a shout so terrifying that they lost all faith in divine protection and took to their heels. Then the Scots, breaking up the schiltron in which they were massed, mounted their horses and pursued the fugitives, killing both clergy and laymen, driving many to drown in the Swale and capturing others. If the battle had not been fought in the late afternoon and brought to a close by night, not an Englishman would have escaped. Three hundred priests were left dead upon the field and for this reason the skirmish was thereafter called the ‘Chapter of Milton’.16
The Scots now spread throughout Yorkshire, burning and destroying, driving away the cattle and leaving the blackened farmsteads to mark their progress through the land. No fewer than eighty-four towns and villages are noted in the English records as burned and pillaged in this raid.
When news was brought to Edward II of the massacre at Myton and the widespread destruction caused by the Scots, he called his whole council together to decide whether it was better to continue the siege of Berwick until it was taken or march back to England to protect their countrymen. There was bitter disagreement between the barons from the south and those from the north. The former wished to complete the capture of Berwick, the latter to break off and rescue their kinsmen. The King inclined to the former against the advice of the Earl of Lancaster, who then in dudgeon marched off with all his followers. Since these made up a third of the army, Edward II had no option but to raise the siege. He attempted to cut off Douglas and Randolph from their home base, but their intimate knowledge of the northern counties made it easy for them to elude him.17
From that time rumours began to spread that the Earl of Lancaster was in league with Robert Bruce, and men pointed out that when the Scots swept across the border only the lands of the earl were left unravaged.18
Edward II had hardly disbanded his army when on 1 November 1319 Douglas returned to England to carry out his most savage raid on the counties of Westmorland and Cumberland. The harvest had just been gathered in and for the first time, after two years of famine, the barns were filled. But all were put to flames and the livestock driven back to Scotland.19
Ever since Bannockburn the Scottish King had offered peace in return for the recognition of his royal title and the independence of his kingdom, and evidence of his sincerity is recorded in the following letter of unknown date:
To the most sincere prince, the Lord Edward, by God’s grace, illustrious King of England, Robert by the same grace King of Scots sends greetings in the name of Him by whom the thrones of rulers are governed.
Since while kindly peace prevails the minds of the faithful are at rest, the Christian way of life is furthered and all the affairs of holy mother church and of all kingdoms are everywhere carried on more prosperously, we in our humility have judged it right to entreat of your highness most earnestly that, having before your eyes the righteousness you owe to God and to the people, you desist from persecuting us and disturbing the people of our realm, so that there may be an end of slaughter and shedding of Christian blood. Everything that we ourselves and our people by their bodily service and contributions of wealth can do, we are now and shall be prepared to do sincerely and honourably for the sake of good peace and to earn perpetual grace for our souls. If it should be agreeable to your will to hold negotiations with us upon these matters, let your royal will be communicated to us in a letter by the hands of the bearer of this present letter.20
But Edward II, remote from his northern subjects and little aware of their increasing sacrifices as a result of his obduracy, had rejected all overtures. Now, after his failure at Berwick, the anger of his northern barons, the lamentations of his decimated clergy and the evidence from his own eyes of the devastated valleys of Yorkshire persuaded him to open negotiations for a truce. Envoys from both countries met at Berwick on 22 December 1319 and agreed terms. The truce was to last for two years from 1 January 1320.21Edward II undertook to destroy Harbottle Castle on the River Coquet and Bruce not to build any castles on the Scottish side of the border – a face-saving clause for Edward as the policy of the Scottish King had always been to demolish any castle he captured.22Ironically, Bruce would in any event have ceased his raids. A severe outbreak of scab had occurred among the sheep in northern England23 and he had issued stringent regulations against the movement of livestock.24
What Edward conceded with one hand he tried to recoup with the other. Within a month of the truce being signed, his representatives at the Holy See had persuaded the Pope to renew his fulminations against the Scots. In a bull of unprecedented rancour, the supreme pontiff summoned the Scottish King and prelates to appear at Avignon to answer for their misdeeds. On this occasion his term of address was to ‘Robert Bruce, governing the Kingdom of Scotland’ – a slight improvement on the ‘Robert Bruce, acting as King of Scots’ which he had previously used, but not enough for the King to accept the document. In retaliation for its rejection, the Pope commanded the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London and Carlisle to repeat the notices of excommunication against Bruce and his companions on every Sabbath and feast day throughout the year, and a little later included the Bishops of St Andrews, Dunkeld, Moray and Aberdeen in the same interdict.
The papal invective at last provoked a noble remonstrance from the Scottish nation. Known as the Declaration of Arbroath, it is believed to have been written by Bernard Linton, Chancellor of Scotland and Abbot of Arbroath. It was sealed with the seals of eight earls and thirty-one barons, and in the name of the community of the realm it was handed to Sir Adam Gordon and Sir Edward Maubisson on 6 April 1320 for safe delivery to the Pope at Avignon.
It began by relating briefly the history of Scotland from earliest times: how their people had been converted to Christianity by St Andrew and had received from the predecessors of the Pope security and privileges as the especial charge of the brother of St Peter. Beneath this protection they had dwelt in freedom and quietness until the King of England, Edward I, pretending to be their friend, had invaded their country when it was without a king and inexperienced in war. The letter then related the cruelties and hardships endured by clergy and laymen under English rule, and continued in phrases of mounting eloquence:
At length it pleased God who alone can heal after wounds to restore us to liberty from those innumerable calamities by our most serene prince, King and Lord, Robert who for the delivering of his people and his own rightful inheritance from the enemies’ hand did like another Joshua or Judas Maccabeus, most cheerfully undergo all manner of toil, fatigue, hardship and hazard. The Divine providence, the right of succession by the laws and customs of the Kingdom (which we will defend till death) and the due and lawful consent and assent of all the people made him our King and prince. To him we are obliged and resolved to adhere in all things, both upon his right and his own merit, as being the person who has restored the people’s safety, in defence of their liberties. But, after all, if this prince shall leave these principles he has so nobly pursued and consent that we of our Kingdom be subjected to the King or people of England, we will immediately endeavour to expel him as our enemy and as the subverter both of his own and our rights and will make another King who will defend our liberties: for so long as there shall be but one hundred of us remain alive we will never give consent to subject ourselves to the dominion of the English. For it is not glory, it is not riches, neither is it honour, but it is freedom alone that we fight and contend for, which no honest man will lose but with his life.
Quietly then the letter reminded the Pope that he was the viceregent of one who makes no distinction between Jews nor Greeks, Scots nor English, and begged him to instruct the King of England to be content with what he possessed and ‘suffer us to live in that narrow spot of Scotland, beyond which is no habitation, since we desire nothing but our own.’
The letter ended with both a promise and an admonition:
God (from whom nothing is hid) knows with what cheerfulness both our King and we would go to the relief of the Holy Land if the King of England would leave us in peace and we do hereby testify and declare it to the Vicar of Christ and to all Christendom. But if your Holiness do not sincerely believe this and remain too trustful of the English tales and favour them to our destruction then we must believe that the Most High will lay to your charge all the blood, loss of souls and other calamities that will follow between us and them.
We commit the defence of our cause to him who is the Sovereign King and Judge, we cast the burden of your cares upon Him and hope for such an issue as may give strength and courage to us and bring our enemies to nothing. The most High God long preserve your Serenity and Holiness for his Holy Church.25
Few men could fail to be stirred by this Declaration of Scottish Independence comparable to that of the United States 426 years later. The impact on the Pope was immediate. His fulminations ceased. Touched in his most tender spot by the offer of support for his long-desired crusade, he sent a stern letter to Edward II exhorting him to make peace with the Scots so that the forces of both countries could be directed against the paynims.
A flurry of diplomatic activity ensued. The English King appointed commissioners headed by the Archbishop of York to treat with the Scots for a permanent peace. Two papal nuncios were sent by the Holy See and two envoys from the court of France, whose King offered to mediate between the two parties. Negotiations dragged on into the spring of 1321 at Newcastle, Berwick and Bamburgh without any move by the English towards recognition of Scottish independence and were then abandoned.
The English, who had the advantage of representatives attending the Pope, persuaded him that the breakdown was entirely the fault of their ungodly opponents. In consequence in February 1321 he fired a salvo of no fewer than six bulls against the Scots, directing that all invaders of England should be excommunicated, that the Scottish bishops should appear before the Pope and that Robert Bruce should once more be doomed to Hell.26
Yet the hand of God seemed not to have been removed from the King of Scots: for in the previous year his Queen, six years after their reunion, had at last shown that she was capable of conceiving by giving birth to a daughter,27 and he himself had survived a plot against his life. A hint of its existence was given by the indiscreet chatter of the Countess of Strathearn, and as suspicion began to grow, Murdoch of Menteith, a Scottish nobleman long resident in England and believed to have been one of the original conspirators, decided to journey to Scotland and reveal the whole matter to the King. Its object was to kill Robert Bruce and place Sir William Soulis, hereditary seneschal of Scotland, on the throne.
Sir William’s father, Sir John Soulis, had been one of the unsuccessful claimants to the throne in 1292, tracing his descent from the illegitimate half sister of Alexander III. Sir William’s mother was the daughter of Alexander Comyn, one-time Earl of Buchan. Agnes Comyn, Countess of Strathearn, was his aunt. The others said to be involved were four barons, Roger Mowbray, Patrick Graham, Eustace Maxwell and David Brechin; two knights, Gilbert Malherbe and John Logie; and one esquire, Richard Brown. The plot would appear to be the last dying paroxysm of the old Comyn-Bruce feud.
Sir William Soulis was seized at Berwick where he had been gathering about him a group of young squires, and the others were swiftly rounded up. A parliament, later known as the Black Parliament, was summoned at Scone on 4 August 1320 to try the conspirators. Sir William Soulis made confession of the whole plot and he and the Countess of Strathearn were imprisoned for life. Graham and Maxwell were acquitted. Malherbe, Logie and Brown were found guilty and executed. Roger Mowbray had died before the parliament met, but his corpse was brought before the judges on a litter. Under an ancient law the sentence of treason involving disinheritance of land, execution and dismemberment could only be pronounced upon the body of a convicted person, alive or dead. On the intervention of Robert Bruce his corpse was spared mutilation and allowed a decent burial.
Sir David Brechin claimed in his defence that the conspirators had sworn him to silence and then revealed the plot: that he had refused to join them but could not break his word. This delicacy of conscience matched ill with the pattern of disloyalty in his career. After his defeat by Bruce at Inverurie in 1309 he had sworn allegiance to him as King of Scots, yet by 1312 he had reverted to the English and was in receipt of a pension from Edward II. He fought against the Scots at Bannockburn and was taken prisoner. Once more he vowed his service to Bruce and was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Arbroath, yet now, by his silence, he had placed his monarch’s life in jeopardy. He was condemned to be drawn behind horses through the streets of Perth and then hanged and beheaded.
Sir Ingram de Umfraville, one time guardian of Scotland and famous warrior, had been captured after Bannockburn where he had fought at the side of the English King. He had made his peace with Bruce, received his Scottish estates and affirmed his intention of settling there by affixing his seal to the Declaration of Arbroath. But David Brechin had been his friend and in anger at his death he renounced his fealty to Bruce. With characteristic generosity, Bruce allowed him to go free, attend his friend’s funeral and have time to sell up his Scottish estates before departing for England where Edward II, under the polite fiction that he had never changed his allegiance, restored to him his English lands.
The circumstances of the conspiracy have remained obscure but that Robert Bruce, who was a humane man, allowed the severest penalty to be exercised on a knight whose service against the Saracens had earned him the title of ‘The Flower of Chivalry’ argues that it was a much more dangerous threat than can be deduced from the brief records that exist. Murdoch of Menteith was rewarded for his information by a grant of lands forfeited by the conspirators, and in 1323 was granted the earldom of Menteith which had become vacant when his niece Mary of Menteith, for whom it had been held in trust, resigned her interest.28
NOTES - CHAPTER 15
1 Cal. Doc. Scots, iii,519
2 ibid., iii, 549
3 ibid., iii, 562
4 Lydon, 115
5 Nicholson, 95
6 Lanercost, 225
7 Barbour, 311–17
8 Dickinson, 130
9 A.P.S., i, 113
10 Barbour, 294–9
11 ibid., 302–7
12 Vita Edwardii, 96
13 ibid., 96
14 Lanercost, 226
15 Vita Edwardii, 96
16 Lanercost, 227
17 Barbour, 308
18 Vita Edwardii, 76, 97
19 Lanercost, 227
20 Barrow, 434
21 Lanercost, 228
22 Cal. Doc. Scots, iii, 677, 681, 738, 739
23 Lanercost, 228
24 Barrow, 419
25 Burton, 284–6 footnote; Dickinson, 131–4
26 Cal. Doc. Scots, iii, 725
27 Dunbar, 142
28 Barbour, 328, 329; Dickinson, S.H.R., xlii, 84–5