In the chaos of 14th-century Scotland, a band of exiled nobles known as the Disinherited rose against the odds, claiming a shocking victory at Dupplin Moor and crowning their leader, Edward Balliol, as king. But triumph soon turned to tragedy, as betrayal and a deadly December ambush unraveled their hold on the Scottish throne.
By James Turner
The outcome of the Battle of Dupplin Moor, fought in August of 1332, was as spectacular as it was unexpected. The Disinherited, a mere handful of exiles leading a skeletal army composed of mercenaries and Northern English adventurers, had routed one army of Bruce loyalists in battle, convincingly seen off another and captured the capital of Scotland. The Guardian of Scotland, Earl Domhnall of Mar, had been slain in battle only days after his election. His primary rival for the regency, Robert Bruce of Liddesdale, two Earls from Bruce-aligned families, a dozen or so other lords and several thousand soldiers were killed alongside him. The scale of this defeat and the significant losses inflicted upon the new leadership cadre of the Bruce royal government sent them into a state of temporary disarray. The Disinherited and their figurehead, Edward Balliol, were all too quick to seize upon this momentary weakness and lack of leadership.
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The Disinherited were the sons and grandsons of Scottish nobles who had been exiled by King Robert the Bruce for opposing his right to the Scottish throne. Several of these men had been allies and confederates of the English kings, aiding them in their bid to subjugate the Scottish throne. Yet others had resisted English occupation just as valiantly as Bruce and his allies had, their opposition to him primarily rooted in their familial ties to other claimants to the Scottish throne. Their nominal leader Edward Balliol was the son and heir of King John Balliol. John had been selected as the next king of Scotland in a process mediated by King Edward I of England in 1292, defeating and displacing the rival claim advanced by Bruce’s grandfather.
However, in 1296 John was forced to abdicate after his attempts to resist the English king’s control led to a disastrous defeat at the Battle of Dunbar. The Disinherited had bided their time in exile in England until in 1332 they sensed an opportunity when the health of Scotland’s regent, Thomas Randolph began to fail. Raising a small army of two thousand men with the tacit blessing of Edward III of England, the Disinherited struck north intent on overthrowing the boy king David II and reclaiming the lands and titles the Bruce family had taken from them.
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The Road to Dupplin Moor
Dupplin Moor had been won as a result of multiple mutually reinforcing factors. The Disinherited had selected a superb position from which to fight a defensive battle, placing their line in the low saddle of two hills located at the foot of the moor. The hills prevented the Disinherited from being easily flanked and rolled up by the far larger Scottish army while giving their archers the perfect vantage point from which to fight. Meanwhile the slope down from the Moor was steep and contoured in such a way as to disorder the tightly packed formation adopted by the Bruce army’s infantry and channel them piecemeal into the centre of the Disinherited’s waiting men-at-arms. This deployment which went a long way to mitigate the Scottish army’s vast numerical advantage and accentuate the strengths of the Disinherited’s English archers was almost certainly the work of the Disinherited’s founder and most veteran commander, Henry de Beaumont.
Over a long career of military service to successive kings of England, Henry had witnessed both the longbow’s potential as a battle-winning weapon and seen it squandered through misuse and poor battlefield placement. The high ratio of archers within the army and their skilful deployment by Henry at Dupplin Moor in support of the army’s dismounted knights and men-at-arms prefigured and informed the tactics which would soon see English armies dominate the battlefields of the Hundred Year’s War. Added to this clever use of the terrain and innovative infantry tactics was the desperate stubbornness of the Disinherited’s men-at-arms, who, determined to do or die, held their ground against their numerically superior enemy. Finally, the rivalry between the Earl of Mar and Robert Bruce of Liddesdale, the illegitimate son of the late king, played a significant part in the Disinherited victory.
Bruce had accused the Earl of Mar, who had a history of collaboration with the English and was personally acquainted with many members of the Disinherited, of treason and of conspiring with the enemy after Mar proposed giving the far smaller army a chance to surrender. In their performative haste to outdo one another and display their loyalty, the two halves of the army began racing each other across the Moor in a bid to reach the enemy first. In doing so, they became somewhat disorganised and spread out, lessening their effectiveness when the leading elements of Bruce’s formation made contact with the enemy. Likewise, the Earl of Mar’s determination to play a pivotal role in the battle by committing his forces to the central melee further restricted and crushed Bruce’s already embattled troops, ultimately dooming many of them.
To many contemporaries in Scotland and beyond, most of whom would have heard only the bare details of the battle and its result, the Disinherited’s victory against such long odds spoke of providence and a degree of divine favour for the Balliol cause. When viewed through modern secularly influenced eyes, it is easy to dismiss this consideration as tangential at best, just another layer to the blended cultural and political shock of the battle’s aftermath. However, divine arbitration of worthy causes through feats of arms was a well-established, if rarely invoked, principle of both medieval theology and law and it is worth noting that following the battle, the majority of the formally staunch pro-Bruce Scottish religious establishment rushed to make terms with Balliol. This sudden influx of clerical support included all but one of Scotland’s bishops, as well as the abbots of Dunfermline, Coupar, Inchaffray, Scone and Arbroath.
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Balliol’s Coronation
In addition to the hastily given support of the Scottish Church, the Disinherited’s victory at Dupplin Moor and their subsequent occupation of Perth persuaded many of the surrounding region’s aristocrats and power brokers to begin presenting themselves at Balliol’s ad hoc court. The most important of these defectors was the hapless Earl Donnchadh, or Duncan, of Fife who had been captured at the battle, before eagerly declaring for Balliol as a means of securing his freedom. As the Earl of Fife and head of the Macduff family, Donnchadh’s defection represented more than a simple model for coercing the support of the senior Scottish aristocracy.
At Scone, on the 24th of September, before his fellow Disinherited, the assembled Scottish prelates and a smattering of local defectors, Edward Balliol was crowned King of Scotland. Earl Donnchadh performed his family’s traditional role in the coronation ceremony by placing the crown upon Edward’s head while the ceremony itself was presided over by Bishop William Sinclair of Dunkeld. The Disinherited now had a lawful king of Scotland, crowned in the correct place by the correct people, with which to legitimize and secure their numerous outstanding territorial claims.
Within modern historiography, the lasting legacy of the Battle of Dupplin Moor and the Disinherited’s great adventure, is its role in foreshadowing both the coming military ascendancy of the English archer and its status as the inciting incident of the, itself often overlooked and heavily abridged, Second War for Scottish Independence. Neither of these legacies would have been readily apparent to contemporaries in the autumn of 1332. While contemporaries would be aware of the decisive role archery played in the battle, it is important to remember that the English, as well as many of their enemies, already made extensive use of the bow in a system of combined arms and tactics. Yes, archery had played a big part in securing victory at Dupplin Moor but the same could be said of the Battle of Falkirk thirty-five years before. Neither battle was hailed by those who fought in it as the beginning of a military revolution. The archers’ legend of forging victories over the flower of French chivalry still lay off in the un-glimpsed and unwritten future.
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Likewise, the Disinherited’s invasion of Scotland was a private enterprise by a clique of nobles that sought to reclaim the lands and titles confiscated from their immediate forebears by installing their own alternative candidate on the throne of Scotland. While it was obvious to most that Edward III had abetted the Disinherited, it was still not clear, probably even to him, whether he would break the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton and intervene militarily on Balliol’s behalf. He had, after all, gone to some pains to create a layer, albeit a tissue thin one of official deniability about his earlier support for the Disinherited.
The seal of Edward Balliol, King of Scotland – Wikimedia Commons
The result of the battle that would have seemed the most momentous and world shaking to its contemporaries within Scotland, the crowning of Balliol, is often overlooked or treated in a cursory manner within many later examinations and retellings of Scottish history. This is partly because of their foreknowledge of the ultimate failure of the Disinherited and partly because they did not want to muddy the narrative of an Anglo-Scottish conflict with unwanted nuance. The Bruce’s Stewart relatives and successors, in their attempts to effectively govern a very different and divided Scotland, found that it was advantageous to conflate Robert I’s reconstruction of the Scottish monarchy with the establishment of a Scottish national identity. In addition to striving to meet the demands of royal propaganda, early modern Scottish historians had a further tendency to transpose the cultural mores and political issues of their day on their interpretation of the past, leading to the deliberate minimization of internal Scottish conflict in their depictions of either War of Independence.
Yet the supporters of David II, those Scottish nobles who had benefited the most from Robert I’s establishment of a new political order, spent decades fighting both the King of England and a King of Scotland. Edward Balliol and his Disinherited supporters did not simply fade into history, dwarfed by the immensity of the Anglo-Scottish conflict they had unwittingly unleashed, they actively had to be reckoned with by their Bruce enemies, their position in Scotland was eroded by years of sustained warfare. At times, backed by their English allies, the Disinherited came perilously close to turning the clock back and restoring the Balliol monarchy in earnest. Indeed, as we shall see, Dupplin Moor was far from the highwater mark of the Disinherited’s success in Scotland.
This discussion about the immediate impact of the Battle of Dupplin Moor and its contrast with the long-term legacy of the Disinherited, of course, raises the question of just how strong the Disinherited position was at the time of Balliol’s coronation in the September of 1332? The losses sustained at Dupplin Moor were a serious and shocking blow to the leadership of the Bruce faction. Yet the Bruce family had in its bid for the throne cultivated the support of some of the Scottish nobility’s most established and influential families, such as the Stewarts and Campbells. Families which had only grown and thrived as a result of the new estates and titles heaped upon them in reward for their loyalty.
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Barely a month after their defeat at Dupplin Moor, new leaders of the pro-Bruce faction were already beginning to emerge and, now cognizant of the danger of facing the Disinherited in pitched battle, were busy preparing a more surreptitious resistance. While it seems that few thanked him for his efforts at the time, Earl Patrick of Dunbar’s decision to dissolve his army when it became clear that any attempt to besiege Perth would end in disaster, actually preserved the lives of thousands of soldiers. The majority of such troops were raised from pro-Bruce regions and their safe return, alongside their commanders, greatly enhanced those areas’ ability to resist the Disinherited.
The primary problem that Edward Balliol and the other Disinherited faced was that their army, while disproportionately formidable, was too small to meaningfully hold onto significant territory. They could comfortably hold Perth and its immediate environs but attempting to stretch their authority further, required dividing the already modest army, rendering its constituent parts excessively vulnerable to raids by Bruce partisans.
In order to make good their claims and exercise a degree of meaningful authority within Scotland, the Disinherited required either reinforcements from England or a greater degree of support from the Scottish aristocracy. While Balliol had received pledges of support from segments of the Scottish nobility, most of these were relatively minor lords from the area now threatened by his army or were captured during battle and forced to submit at the point of a sword, such as Earl Donnchadh of Fife. Other newcomers to Perth were men of relatively modest means who hoped to profit through service to this new king and claim a share of potential future conquests.
Such defections were motivated by survival instinct and opportunism rather than genuine enthusiasm for the idea of a Balliol restoration. As such, these fresh adherents to the Disinherited’s cause could not be relied upon to provide their whole-hearted support or even retain their newfound loyalties once the implicit threat of the Disinherited’s army was removed.
Balliol and Edward III
The Disinherited were probably hampered in this regard by the amount of time that had passed since the Bruce family’s political ascendancy. The Disinherited were the sons, sons-in-law and even grandsons of those men that had been deprived of their Scottish lands and titles for refusing to submit to Robert I. An entire generation had passed in the eighteen years since Bannockburn and the communities once ruled over by the Disinherited’s forebears had been given ample time to form attachments to their new, Bruce appointed, masters. It had been twelve years since the unravelling of the Soules Conspiracy which saw the arrest and execution of many of the Balliol’s most adherent supporters in Scotland. It had been a staggering thirty-six years since Edward’s father, John Balliol, was forced to abdicate the throne of Scotland and ceased to exercise any measure of royal authority. Perhaps time, just as much as the proactive policies of the Bruce royal government, had seen Balliol support within Scotland thin.
Balliol and his Disinherited allies had good reason to linger in Perth after the Battle of Dupplin Moor. Their army had to be rested after the colossal efforts it made during the battle, preparations for Edward’s crucial coronation had to be made and time allowed for news of their victory to spread and Scottish defectors to make their way to Perth. However, the new leaders of the Bruce faction were rapidly organising and the Disinherited were keenly aware that to tarry in Perth further would risk them becoming isolated and encircled. Besieged in a strategic, if not necessarily tactical sense. Edward’s solution to this threat was an aggressive one which sought to make the most of the lingering advantages won at Dupplin Moor.
Gathering what local reinforcements they could, the Disinherited struck out for the one area of Scotland that had seen large scale pro-Balliol uprisings in response to their arrival; Edward’s ancestral lordship, Galloway. The plan had several points to recommend it. Firstly, if successful, it would allow them to establish a proper power base within Scotland, whose military and financial resources could be tapped into to support further campaigns. Secondly the journey itself, an armed sojourn across the length and breadth of Scotland, at a time in which the Bruce government controlled no major armies, would provide plenty of opportunity to rally further supporters or at the very least to intimidate them into submission. Finally, establishing themselves in Galloway, located in the southwest of Scotland, would place the Disinherited in a position where they could reliably communicate and negotiate with Edward III of England.
Before departing, Edward left the Earl of Fife in command of Perth and a small garrison. The Earl was by far the highest-ranking defector to join the Disinherited and therefore needed to be treated with a measure of respect. By granting him the prestigious custodianship of the kingdom’s capital, Edward may have hoped to further secure the Earl’s loyalty and signal to other potential defectors from the Bruce party that he was willing to treat them generously. Of course, by entrusting Perth to the Earl of Fife, who had his own troops and military resources, Edward was also preserving his valuable archers and veteran men-at-arms for the main expedition.
Over the course of the following two weeks, Edward crossed Scotland. The Disinherited army headed for Irvine on the west coast before cutting inland through Coylton in South Ayrshire and pushing on into Galloway. At no point in this lengthy journey did they encounter any armed or organised resistance. Everywhere the army marched, David II’s die-hard supporters would melt away, leaving the locals to make hasty, if perhaps largely insincere, submissions to Edward Balliol.
By far the most notable of these submissions was that of Alexander Bruce, the perhaps illegitimate son of Edward Bruce and yet another nephew of the late Robert I. Alexander, whose mother, Isabella, was an aunt of the Disinherited leader David Starthbogie, had eventually succeeded his father to the Earldom of Carrick. His surrender and subsequent profession of loyalty to Balliol delivered them effective control of the southwest of Scotland. That Alexander Bruce, a first cousin of David II and senior member of the Bruce party, was willing to capitulate to a Balliol claimant is a highly instructive example of the perpetually caveated nature of loyalty and politics during this period. Alexander was, in the short term at least, willing to renounce his normally advantageous familial connections in order to maintain immediate control of his Earldom and position of primacy within its interconnected web of aristocratic affinities.
Map showing counties claimed by England in the 1334 Treaty of Newcastle. Map by MrPenguin20 / Wikimedia Commons
Emboldened by this utter lack of resistance and the warm welcome he received in Galloway, Balliol decided to press his advantage as far as he could and marched his forces back eastward into the heavily fortified border region. It was here that they at last ran into a semblance of opposition. As the Disinherited army was sweeping the countryside around the crucial border town of Jedburgh and its accompanying fortifications, they were ambushed by a force of Bruce loyalists led by Archibald Douglas. Archibald was a younger brother of Bruce’s famed commander and companion James ‘The Black’ Douglas and had served in the Scottish invasion of England in 1327. James’ eldest son and heir, William, was a young man, likely in his early to mid-teens, in 1332 leaving the management and defence of the family’s numerous interests in the region to his uncle. Archibald was also the father-in-law of the defector, Earl Alexander Bruce of Carrick. This attack, probably conducted in the hopes of catching the Disinherited army while it was still dispersed for travel, was discovered and repelled without difficulty. During the brief skirmish, one of Douglas’ subordinates, Robert Lauder, whose father and namesake was the Bruce, was taken prisoner.
Flushed by this minor victory, the Disinherited pushed on to Roxburgh, occupying the castle on the 3rd of October. Roxburgh castle had been built by David I of Scotland, sometime around the early 1130s. In accordance with its status as a crucial border fort, its defences had been greatly strengthened by successive kings of Scotland until Robert I had partially demolished it as part of his policy of denying fortifications to the enemy. Despite this, its occupation was, even in its ruined state, of considerable strategic value, although it is notable that Edward himself was lodged in the nearby but much more comfortable Kelso Abbey.
The Disinherited enthusiasm for this success and the continued lack of serious opposition was probably dampened somewhat when word reached them that Perth had fallen on the 7th of October to a Bruce army under the leadership of Robert Keith, Bruce’s hereditary Marshall of Scotland and a veteran of Bannockburn. Earl Donnchadh was captured alongside the city but soon talked his way out of captivity, once again inveigling his way into the upper echelons of Bruce loyalists. The Disinherited would also have been aware that as they progressed through Roxburghshire and the surrounding countryside, they were being shadowed by an army under the leadership of Andrew de Moray. Andrew’s father, for whom he was named, had been an ally and co-commander of William Wallace before he died of wounds sustained during their celebrated victory at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. The younger Andrew had been captured by Edward I as a child in 1303 and raised in captivity until he was finally freed in the grand prisoner exchange that followed the Battle of Bannockburn.
Following the death of the Earl of Mar at Dupplin Moor, Moray had been hastily elected as the new Guardian of Scotland by a small conclave of Bruce supporters. However, Andrew’s appointment owed more to his position within the Scottish aristocracy and his father’s glorious legacy than it did his military credentials. Nevertheless Moray, aware of the potentially disastrous consequences of engaging the Disinherited in open battle, began to stalk them through the borders. Attempting through frequent harassing actions and the threat of his army’s continued presence in their rear to contain the Disinherited and arrest their advance. Moray and his subordinates spotted a potential decisive opportunity in Balliol’s instance in quartering away from the main Disinherited army based in Roxburgh Castle.
However, rather than simply fall upon Balliol and overwhelm his bodyguard while sending a blocking force to the nearby Kelso Bridge, the Bruce commanders instead elected to attempt to demolish the bridge. The arduous and conspicuous nature of this work alerted the Roxburgh garrison who were able to ford the river and come to Edward’s assistance. Worse still for the Bruce loyalists, with the alarm raised they were soon driven off from the bridge, leading to Andrew Moray’s capture, alongside the notorious Flemish mercenary, John Crabbe.
This was a serious blow to the coherence and continuity of Bruce’s leadership who had now lost two Guardians to the enemy in less than a month. Interestingly, both men’s captors were allowed to sell on their ransoms to King Edward III of England. Cashing out a ransom by trading custody of a prisoner to a superior with the resources necessary to hold them in suitable comfort and security while engaged in the lengthy and complex process of negotiating and collecting the full sum was a relatively common practice. It was also a way for lesser knights or men-at-arms to earn the gratitude of their commanders.
English interest in supervising the incarceration of John Crabbe was easily explained by his previous piratical predations on English shipping. Andrew de Moray, on the other hand, was the Guardian of Scotland and the lawfully appointed regent of David II, the English king’s brother-in-law. Moray may have exercised some influence on this decision by arguing that as the Guardian of Scotland he could not be ransomed by someone of lesser rank and that he therefore had to be handed over to Edward III of England. However, this was clearly a politically motivated snub, meant to underline his continued rejection of Balliol’s claim to the Scottish throne. As such Balliol and his fellow Disinherited were under no real legal obligation to acquiesce to Moray’s demands. That they did so, and that Edward III actually accepted this offer, shows both the influence the English king wielded over the rank and file of the Disinherited and the keen interest he was now taking in their progress.
The transfer of such valuable prisoners to England and out of his hands shows either the ardency with which Edward Balliol was trying to court his English counterparts’ support or that he, the king of Scotland, lacked the necessary influence over his largely English army to resist. Edward III was young, hot headed and excessively proud, traits which to contemporary eyes all had a distinctly romantic and kingly air about them. Edward Balliol must have been aware of the precariousness of his own position and the multitude of options available to the younger Edward, should he wish to embark on a great northern military adventure. Balliol and his allies were in a sense gambling that Edward III would see the value in supporting their claim to the throne of Scotland, in exchange for recognition of the English king’s suzerainty over the British Isles.
Edward III as head of the Order of the Garter, drawing c. 1430–40 in the Bruges Garter Book
Yet Edward III could also choose to emulate his grandfather’s strategy, sidelining the Balliols and attempting to rule an occupied Scotland through a council composed of English garrison commanders and Scottish aristocratic collaborators. Then there was the possibility that the young David II, who was after all Edward III’s brother-in-law, would, once separated from the families of his father’s supporters, make for a more expedient and pliant junior partner or puppet king. Such an arrangement would after all avoid the troublesome task of removing large swathes of the Scottish aristocracy from their treasured offices and estates to make room for Balliol’s Disinherited allies.
In late November, Edward Balliol attempted to tip the younger king’s hand and galvanize him into action by publishing the details of an agreement he alleged the two had reached prior to the Disinherited invasion of Scotland. According to this agreement, Edward and his heirs agreed to pay homage to the Kings of England as the rightful feudal overlords of Scotland. In addition to this, they committed to undertaking military service on behalf of the English king when summoned, alongside 200 Scottish men-at-arms. In exchange for help in securing the Scottish throne for his family, Balliol further agreed to cede £20,000 worth of territory and fortifications, which were to be permanently annexed by England. A further clause stated that Edward Balliol promised to treat a dethroned David II equitably and proposed a potential marriage between the almost fifty-year-old Balliol and Edward III’s then eleven-year-old sister, Joan, in the event that she chose to repudiate her marriage to David.
It is probable that this agreement was genuine rather than a strangely belligerent offer meant to tempt Edward III into granting his support. It is difficult to imagine that Edward III would have allowed the Disinherited to invade Scotland and tacitly provide them with the necessary financial backing without establishing some method of benefiting from their success. The specificity of the terms in regard to the amount of territory to be ceded to England and the conditions surrounding the military service owed by the Scottish king suggest that they are the product of extended negotiations.
Balliol must have been keenly aware that the surrendering of Scottish territory to England would be hugely unpopular amongst the Scottish nobility whose support he eventually hoped to win. That he would risk further isolating them by publishing a hitherto secret agreement with Edward III is compelling evidence that he had become convinced that he required English aid to properly establish himself as King of Scotland despite the current lack of significant opposition. This may well have reflected the cash-strapped, would-be king’s difficulties in continuing to pay the Disinherited army without resorting to plunder and extortion which would have further alienated his potential subjects.
The Yuletide Massacre at Annan
While Edward III pondered the issue and attempted to solicit the support of a rather uncooperative English parliament, Edward Balliol agreed to a winter truce with David II’s caretakers. He did so on the understanding that the truce would last until early February when a parliament could be convened which would have the authority to discuss a more permanent agreement. Content that matters would rest where they lay until February, Edward withdrew from Roxburghshire and prepared to celebrate Christmas in Annan in the south of Galloway. From there, most of the Disninherited’s carefully scraped together-army returned to their respective homes, scattered across the north of England.
The keystone of the Disinherited’s unprecedented success up until this point had been their audacity. Edward had in settling down for the winter, bartered away the strategic initiative that had in a few months seen him rise from French prisoner to anointed king. Worse still, he had badly underestimated the resolve of his enemies and the extraordinary lengths they would go to thwart the return of the Disinherited.
On the 16th December, Archibald Douglas, who had succeeded the captured Andrew de Moray as Guardian of Scotland, reneged on the ceasefire and fell upon Annan with a considerable contingent of troops. In contrast to his earlier failure at Jedburgh, this attack was a spectacular success. The Disinherited, confident in the sanctity of the truce, were literally caught in bed and several hundred of them were remorselessly slain. Amongst the losses were such senior members as Walter Comyn, Roger de Mowbray and Edward’s brother and immediate heir, Henry Balliol. Edward only escaped by breaking down a partitioning wall in his accommodation and fleeing half-dressed into the winter shrouded Galwegian countryside. Earl Edward Bruce of Carrick was captured and after narrowly escaping summary execution was allowed to make peace with his relatives and rather sheepishly return to the Bruce fold.
For all the ease with which they had been achieved, the Disinherited’s territorial gains in Scotland were brittle. They were ultimately predicated on the half-hearted or outright coerced cooperation of those regions that had fallen directly in the path of the Disinherited army. With the defeat at Annan and the threat of the Disinherited army lifted, Balliol’s authority in Scotland, such as it was, simply dissolved overnight. All the hard-won gains made by the Disinherited over the past couple of months had come to nothing, all as a result of the new Guardians’ decisive, if treacherous, raid.
Balliol emerged, deeply bedraggled, a few days after the disaster in Carlisle where he was afforded a warm welcome. It then appears that he dispatched envoys to York where Edward III was holding a session of the English Parliament. Indeed, many of the now scattered Disinherited would have been summoned to attend the Parliament as land owning members of the English nobility. The convening of this Parliament in York was far from a coincidence, and it was dominated by the question of how to react to the unfolding events in Scotland. Edward III made a great show of soliciting the advice of Parliament, but when they remained stubbornly non-committal or outrightly leery of renewed war, he began preparing for the invasion of Scotland anyway.
Edward III would support Balliol in securing the throne of Scotland, but he was determined to negotiate as high a price as possible, eagerly taking advantage of his ally’s now greatly reduced circumstances. Rather than £20,000 worth of land scattered across the borders, the English king would now aim to annex the majority of southern Scotland, including Edinburgh, Selkirk, Roxburghshire, Dumfries and Peebles. The desperate Edward Balliol had little recourse but to accept in the hopes that his hawkish English allies could place him on the throne of a now greatly reduced kingdom.
James Turner has recently completed his doctoral studies at Durham University before which he attended the University of Glasgow. Deeply afraid of numbers and distrustful of counting, his main research interests surround medieval aristocratic culture and identity. You can follow James on X/Twitter @HistorySchmstry
In the chaos of 14th-century Scotland, a band of exiled nobles known as the Disinherited rose against the odds, claiming a shocking victory at Dupplin Moor and crowning their leader, Edward Balliol, as king. But triumph soon turned to tragedy, as betrayal and a deadly December ambush unraveled their hold on the Scottish throne.
By James Turner
The outcome of the Battle of Dupplin Moor, fought in August of 1332, was as spectacular as it was unexpected. The Disinherited, a mere handful of exiles leading a skeletal army composed of mercenaries and Northern English adventurers, had routed one army of Bruce loyalists in battle, convincingly seen off another and captured the capital of Scotland. The Guardian of Scotland, Earl Domhnall of Mar, had been slain in battle only days after his election. His primary rival for the regency, Robert Bruce of Liddesdale, two Earls from Bruce-aligned families, a dozen or so other lords and several thousand soldiers were killed alongside him. The scale of this defeat and the significant losses inflicted upon the new leadership cadre of the Bruce royal government sent them into a state of temporary disarray. The Disinherited and their figurehead, Edward Balliol, were all too quick to seize upon this momentary weakness and lack of leadership.
The Disinherited were the sons and grandsons of Scottish nobles who had been exiled by King Robert the Bruce for opposing his right to the Scottish throne. Several of these men had been allies and confederates of the English kings, aiding them in their bid to subjugate the Scottish throne. Yet others had resisted English occupation just as valiantly as Bruce and his allies had, their opposition to him primarily rooted in their familial ties to other claimants to the Scottish throne. Their nominal leader Edward Balliol was the son and heir of King John Balliol. John had been selected as the next king of Scotland in a process mediated by King Edward I of England in 1292, defeating and displacing the rival claim advanced by Bruce’s grandfather.
However, in 1296 John was forced to abdicate after his attempts to resist the English king’s control led to a disastrous defeat at the Battle of Dunbar. The Disinherited had bided their time in exile in England until in 1332 they sensed an opportunity when the health of Scotland’s regent, Thomas Randolph began to fail. Raising a small army of two thousand men with the tacit blessing of Edward III of England, the Disinherited struck north intent on overthrowing the boy king David II and reclaiming the lands and titles the Bruce family had taken from them.
The Road to Dupplin Moor
Dupplin Moor had been won as a result of multiple mutually reinforcing factors. The Disinherited had selected a superb position from which to fight a defensive battle, placing their line in the low saddle of two hills located at the foot of the moor. The hills prevented the Disinherited from being easily flanked and rolled up by the far larger Scottish army while giving their archers the perfect vantage point from which to fight. Meanwhile the slope down from the Moor was steep and contoured in such a way as to disorder the tightly packed formation adopted by the Bruce army’s infantry and channel them piecemeal into the centre of the Disinherited’s waiting men-at-arms. This deployment which went a long way to mitigate the Scottish army’s vast numerical advantage and accentuate the strengths of the Disinherited’s English archers was almost certainly the work of the Disinherited’s founder and most veteran commander, Henry de Beaumont.
Over a long career of military service to successive kings of England, Henry had witnessed both the longbow’s potential as a battle-winning weapon and seen it squandered through misuse and poor battlefield placement. The high ratio of archers within the army and their skilful deployment by Henry at Dupplin Moor in support of the army’s dismounted knights and men-at-arms prefigured and informed the tactics which would soon see English armies dominate the battlefields of the Hundred Year’s War. Added to this clever use of the terrain and innovative infantry tactics was the desperate stubbornness of the Disinherited’s men-at-arms, who, determined to do or die, held their ground against their numerically superior enemy. Finally, the rivalry between the Earl of Mar and Robert Bruce of Liddesdale, the illegitimate son of the late king, played a significant part in the Disinherited victory.
Bruce had accused the Earl of Mar, who had a history of collaboration with the English and was personally acquainted with many members of the Disinherited, of treason and of conspiring with the enemy after Mar proposed giving the far smaller army a chance to surrender. In their performative haste to outdo one another and display their loyalty, the two halves of the army began racing each other across the Moor in a bid to reach the enemy first. In doing so, they became somewhat disorganised and spread out, lessening their effectiveness when the leading elements of Bruce’s formation made contact with the enemy. Likewise, the Earl of Mar’s determination to play a pivotal role in the battle by committing his forces to the central melee further restricted and crushed Bruce’s already embattled troops, ultimately dooming many of them.
To many contemporaries in Scotland and beyond, most of whom would have heard only the bare details of the battle and its result, the Disinherited’s victory against such long odds spoke of providence and a degree of divine favour for the Balliol cause. When viewed through modern secularly influenced eyes, it is easy to dismiss this consideration as tangential at best, just another layer to the blended cultural and political shock of the battle’s aftermath. However, divine arbitration of worthy causes through feats of arms was a well-established, if rarely invoked, principle of both medieval theology and law and it is worth noting that following the battle, the majority of the formally staunch pro-Bruce Scottish religious establishment rushed to make terms with Balliol. This sudden influx of clerical support included all but one of Scotland’s bishops, as well as the abbots of Dunfermline, Coupar, Inchaffray, Scone and Arbroath.
Balliol’s Coronation
In addition to the hastily given support of the Scottish Church, the Disinherited’s victory at Dupplin Moor and their subsequent occupation of Perth persuaded many of the surrounding region’s aristocrats and power brokers to begin presenting themselves at Balliol’s ad hoc court. The most important of these defectors was the hapless Earl Donnchadh, or Duncan, of Fife who had been captured at the battle, before eagerly declaring for Balliol as a means of securing his freedom. As the Earl of Fife and head of the Macduff family, Donnchadh’s defection represented more than a simple model for coercing the support of the senior Scottish aristocracy.
At Scone, on the 24th of September, before his fellow Disinherited, the assembled Scottish prelates and a smattering of local defectors, Edward Balliol was crowned King of Scotland. Earl Donnchadh performed his family’s traditional role in the coronation ceremony by placing the crown upon Edward’s head while the ceremony itself was presided over by Bishop William Sinclair of Dunkeld. The Disinherited now had a lawful king of Scotland, crowned in the correct place by the correct people, with which to legitimize and secure their numerous outstanding territorial claims.
Within modern historiography, the lasting legacy of the Battle of Dupplin Moor and the Disinherited’s great adventure, is its role in foreshadowing both the coming military ascendancy of the English archer and its status as the inciting incident of the, itself often overlooked and heavily abridged, Second War for Scottish Independence. Neither of these legacies would have been readily apparent to contemporaries in the autumn of 1332. While contemporaries would be aware of the decisive role archery played in the battle, it is important to remember that the English, as well as many of their enemies, already made extensive use of the bow in a system of combined arms and tactics. Yes, archery had played a big part in securing victory at Dupplin Moor but the same could be said of the Battle of Falkirk thirty-five years before. Neither battle was hailed by those who fought in it as the beginning of a military revolution. The archers’ legend of forging victories over the flower of French chivalry still lay off in the un-glimpsed and unwritten future.
Likewise, the Disinherited’s invasion of Scotland was a private enterprise by a clique of nobles that sought to reclaim the lands and titles confiscated from their immediate forebears by installing their own alternative candidate on the throne of Scotland. While it was obvious to most that Edward III had abetted the Disinherited, it was still not clear, probably even to him, whether he would break the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton and intervene militarily on Balliol’s behalf. He had, after all, gone to some pains to create a layer, albeit a tissue thin one of official deniability about his earlier support for the Disinherited.
The result of the battle that would have seemed the most momentous and world shaking to its contemporaries within Scotland, the crowning of Balliol, is often overlooked or treated in a cursory manner within many later examinations and retellings of Scottish history. This is partly because of their foreknowledge of the ultimate failure of the Disinherited and partly because they did not want to muddy the narrative of an Anglo-Scottish conflict with unwanted nuance. The Bruce’s Stewart relatives and successors, in their attempts to effectively govern a very different and divided Scotland, found that it was advantageous to conflate Robert I’s reconstruction of the Scottish monarchy with the establishment of a Scottish national identity. In addition to striving to meet the demands of royal propaganda, early modern Scottish historians had a further tendency to transpose the cultural mores and political issues of their day on their interpretation of the past, leading to the deliberate minimization of internal Scottish conflict in their depictions of either War of Independence.
Yet the supporters of David II, those Scottish nobles who had benefited the most from Robert I’s establishment of a new political order, spent decades fighting both the King of England and a King of Scotland. Edward Balliol and his Disinherited supporters did not simply fade into history, dwarfed by the immensity of the Anglo-Scottish conflict they had unwittingly unleashed, they actively had to be reckoned with by their Bruce enemies, their position in Scotland was eroded by years of sustained warfare. At times, backed by their English allies, the Disinherited came perilously close to turning the clock back and restoring the Balliol monarchy in earnest. Indeed, as we shall see, Dupplin Moor was far from the highwater mark of the Disinherited’s success in Scotland.
This discussion about the immediate impact of the Battle of Dupplin Moor and its contrast with the long-term legacy of the Disinherited, of course, raises the question of just how strong the Disinherited position was at the time of Balliol’s coronation in the September of 1332? The losses sustained at Dupplin Moor were a serious and shocking blow to the leadership of the Bruce faction. Yet the Bruce family had in its bid for the throne cultivated the support of some of the Scottish nobility’s most established and influential families, such as the Stewarts and Campbells. Families which had only grown and thrived as a result of the new estates and titles heaped upon them in reward for their loyalty.
Barely a month after their defeat at Dupplin Moor, new leaders of the pro-Bruce faction were already beginning to emerge and, now cognizant of the danger of facing the Disinherited in pitched battle, were busy preparing a more surreptitious resistance. While it seems that few thanked him for his efforts at the time, Earl Patrick of Dunbar’s decision to dissolve his army when it became clear that any attempt to besiege Perth would end in disaster, actually preserved the lives of thousands of soldiers. The majority of such troops were raised from pro-Bruce regions and their safe return, alongside their commanders, greatly enhanced those areas’ ability to resist the Disinherited.
The primary problem that Edward Balliol and the other Disinherited faced was that their army, while disproportionately formidable, was too small to meaningfully hold onto significant territory. They could comfortably hold Perth and its immediate environs but attempting to stretch their authority further, required dividing the already modest army, rendering its constituent parts excessively vulnerable to raids by Bruce partisans.
In order to make good their claims and exercise a degree of meaningful authority within Scotland, the Disinherited required either reinforcements from England or a greater degree of support from the Scottish aristocracy. While Balliol had received pledges of support from segments of the Scottish nobility, most of these were relatively minor lords from the area now threatened by his army or were captured during battle and forced to submit at the point of a sword, such as Earl Donnchadh of Fife. Other newcomers to Perth were men of relatively modest means who hoped to profit through service to this new king and claim a share of potential future conquests.
Such defections were motivated by survival instinct and opportunism rather than genuine enthusiasm for the idea of a Balliol restoration. As such, these fresh adherents to the Disinherited’s cause could not be relied upon to provide their whole-hearted support or even retain their newfound loyalties once the implicit threat of the Disinherited’s army was removed.
Balliol and Edward III
The Disinherited were probably hampered in this regard by the amount of time that had passed since the Bruce family’s political ascendancy. The Disinherited were the sons, sons-in-law and even grandsons of those men that had been deprived of their Scottish lands and titles for refusing to submit to Robert I. An entire generation had passed in the eighteen years since Bannockburn and the communities once ruled over by the Disinherited’s forebears had been given ample time to form attachments to their new, Bruce appointed, masters. It had been twelve years since the unravelling of the Soules Conspiracy which saw the arrest and execution of many of the Balliol’s most adherent supporters in Scotland. It had been a staggering thirty-six years since Edward’s father, John Balliol, was forced to abdicate the throne of Scotland and ceased to exercise any measure of royal authority. Perhaps time, just as much as the proactive policies of the Bruce royal government, had seen Balliol support within Scotland thin.
Balliol and his Disinherited allies had good reason to linger in Perth after the Battle of Dupplin Moor. Their army had to be rested after the colossal efforts it made during the battle, preparations for Edward’s crucial coronation had to be made and time allowed for news of their victory to spread and Scottish defectors to make their way to Perth. However, the new leaders of the Bruce faction were rapidly organising and the Disinherited were keenly aware that to tarry in Perth further would risk them becoming isolated and encircled. Besieged in a strategic, if not necessarily tactical sense. Edward’s solution to this threat was an aggressive one which sought to make the most of the lingering advantages won at Dupplin Moor.
Gathering what local reinforcements they could, the Disinherited struck out for the one area of Scotland that had seen large scale pro-Balliol uprisings in response to their arrival; Edward’s ancestral lordship, Galloway. The plan had several points to recommend it. Firstly, if successful, it would allow them to establish a proper power base within Scotland, whose military and financial resources could be tapped into to support further campaigns. Secondly the journey itself, an armed sojourn across the length and breadth of Scotland, at a time in which the Bruce government controlled no major armies, would provide plenty of opportunity to rally further supporters or at the very least to intimidate them into submission. Finally, establishing themselves in Galloway, located in the southwest of Scotland, would place the Disinherited in a position where they could reliably communicate and negotiate with Edward III of England.
Before departing, Edward left the Earl of Fife in command of Perth and a small garrison. The Earl was by far the highest-ranking defector to join the Disinherited and therefore needed to be treated with a measure of respect. By granting him the prestigious custodianship of the kingdom’s capital, Edward may have hoped to further secure the Earl’s loyalty and signal to other potential defectors from the Bruce party that he was willing to treat them generously. Of course, by entrusting Perth to the Earl of Fife, who had his own troops and military resources, Edward was also preserving his valuable archers and veteran men-at-arms for the main expedition.
Over the course of the following two weeks, Edward crossed Scotland. The Disinherited army headed for Irvine on the west coast before cutting inland through Coylton in South Ayrshire and pushing on into Galloway. At no point in this lengthy journey did they encounter any armed or organised resistance. Everywhere the army marched, David II’s die-hard supporters would melt away, leaving the locals to make hasty, if perhaps largely insincere, submissions to Edward Balliol.
By far the most notable of these submissions was that of Alexander Bruce, the perhaps illegitimate son of Edward Bruce and yet another nephew of the late Robert I. Alexander, whose mother, Isabella, was an aunt of the Disinherited leader David Starthbogie, had eventually succeeded his father to the Earldom of Carrick. His surrender and subsequent profession of loyalty to Balliol delivered them effective control of the southwest of Scotland. That Alexander Bruce, a first cousin of David II and senior member of the Bruce party, was willing to capitulate to a Balliol claimant is a highly instructive example of the perpetually caveated nature of loyalty and politics during this period. Alexander was, in the short term at least, willing to renounce his normally advantageous familial connections in order to maintain immediate control of his Earldom and position of primacy within its interconnected web of aristocratic affinities.
Emboldened by this utter lack of resistance and the warm welcome he received in Galloway, Balliol decided to press his advantage as far as he could and marched his forces back eastward into the heavily fortified border region. It was here that they at last ran into a semblance of opposition. As the Disinherited army was sweeping the countryside around the crucial border town of Jedburgh and its accompanying fortifications, they were ambushed by a force of Bruce loyalists led by Archibald Douglas. Archibald was a younger brother of Bruce’s famed commander and companion James ‘The Black’ Douglas and had served in the Scottish invasion of England in 1327. James’ eldest son and heir, William, was a young man, likely in his early to mid-teens, in 1332 leaving the management and defence of the family’s numerous interests in the region to his uncle. Archibald was also the father-in-law of the defector, Earl Alexander Bruce of Carrick. This attack, probably conducted in the hopes of catching the Disinherited army while it was still dispersed for travel, was discovered and repelled without difficulty. During the brief skirmish, one of Douglas’ subordinates, Robert Lauder, whose father and namesake was the Bruce, was taken prisoner.
Flushed by this minor victory, the Disinherited pushed on to Roxburgh, occupying the castle on the 3rd of October. Roxburgh castle had been built by David I of Scotland, sometime around the early 1130s. In accordance with its status as a crucial border fort, its defences had been greatly strengthened by successive kings of Scotland until Robert I had partially demolished it as part of his policy of denying fortifications to the enemy. Despite this, its occupation was, even in its ruined state, of considerable strategic value, although it is notable that Edward himself was lodged in the nearby but much more comfortable Kelso Abbey.
The Disinherited enthusiasm for this success and the continued lack of serious opposition was probably dampened somewhat when word reached them that Perth had fallen on the 7th of October to a Bruce army under the leadership of Robert Keith, Bruce’s hereditary Marshall of Scotland and a veteran of Bannockburn. Earl Donnchadh was captured alongside the city but soon talked his way out of captivity, once again inveigling his way into the upper echelons of Bruce loyalists. The Disinherited would also have been aware that as they progressed through Roxburghshire and the surrounding countryside, they were being shadowed by an army under the leadership of Andrew de Moray. Andrew’s father, for whom he was named, had been an ally and co-commander of William Wallace before he died of wounds sustained during their celebrated victory at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. The younger Andrew had been captured by Edward I as a child in 1303 and raised in captivity until he was finally freed in the grand prisoner exchange that followed the Battle of Bannockburn.
Following the death of the Earl of Mar at Dupplin Moor, Moray had been hastily elected as the new Guardian of Scotland by a small conclave of Bruce supporters. However, Andrew’s appointment owed more to his position within the Scottish aristocracy and his father’s glorious legacy than it did his military credentials. Nevertheless Moray, aware of the potentially disastrous consequences of engaging the Disinherited in open battle, began to stalk them through the borders. Attempting through frequent harassing actions and the threat of his army’s continued presence in their rear to contain the Disinherited and arrest their advance. Moray and his subordinates spotted a potential decisive opportunity in Balliol’s instance in quartering away from the main Disinherited army based in Roxburgh Castle.
However, rather than simply fall upon Balliol and overwhelm his bodyguard while sending a blocking force to the nearby Kelso Bridge, the Bruce commanders instead elected to attempt to demolish the bridge. The arduous and conspicuous nature of this work alerted the Roxburgh garrison who were able to ford the river and come to Edward’s assistance. Worse still for the Bruce loyalists, with the alarm raised they were soon driven off from the bridge, leading to Andrew Moray’s capture, alongside the notorious Flemish mercenary, John Crabbe.
This was a serious blow to the coherence and continuity of Bruce’s leadership who had now lost two Guardians to the enemy in less than a month. Interestingly, both men’s captors were allowed to sell on their ransoms to King Edward III of England. Cashing out a ransom by trading custody of a prisoner to a superior with the resources necessary to hold them in suitable comfort and security while engaged in the lengthy and complex process of negotiating and collecting the full sum was a relatively common practice. It was also a way for lesser knights or men-at-arms to earn the gratitude of their commanders.
English interest in supervising the incarceration of John Crabbe was easily explained by his previous piratical predations on English shipping. Andrew de Moray, on the other hand, was the Guardian of Scotland and the lawfully appointed regent of David II, the English king’s brother-in-law. Moray may have exercised some influence on this decision by arguing that as the Guardian of Scotland he could not be ransomed by someone of lesser rank and that he therefore had to be handed over to Edward III of England. However, this was clearly a politically motivated snub, meant to underline his continued rejection of Balliol’s claim to the Scottish throne. As such Balliol and his fellow Disinherited were under no real legal obligation to acquiesce to Moray’s demands. That they did so, and that Edward III actually accepted this offer, shows both the influence the English king wielded over the rank and file of the Disinherited and the keen interest he was now taking in their progress.
The transfer of such valuable prisoners to England and out of his hands shows either the ardency with which Edward Balliol was trying to court his English counterparts’ support or that he, the king of Scotland, lacked the necessary influence over his largely English army to resist. Edward III was young, hot headed and excessively proud, traits which to contemporary eyes all had a distinctly romantic and kingly air about them. Edward Balliol must have been aware of the precariousness of his own position and the multitude of options available to the younger Edward, should he wish to embark on a great northern military adventure. Balliol and his allies were in a sense gambling that Edward III would see the value in supporting their claim to the throne of Scotland, in exchange for recognition of the English king’s suzerainty over the British Isles.
Yet Edward III could also choose to emulate his grandfather’s strategy, sidelining the Balliols and attempting to rule an occupied Scotland through a council composed of English garrison commanders and Scottish aristocratic collaborators. Then there was the possibility that the young David II, who was after all Edward III’s brother-in-law, would, once separated from the families of his father’s supporters, make for a more expedient and pliant junior partner or puppet king. Such an arrangement would after all avoid the troublesome task of removing large swathes of the Scottish aristocracy from their treasured offices and estates to make room for Balliol’s Disinherited allies.
In late November, Edward Balliol attempted to tip the younger king’s hand and galvanize him into action by publishing the details of an agreement he alleged the two had reached prior to the Disinherited invasion of Scotland. According to this agreement, Edward and his heirs agreed to pay homage to the Kings of England as the rightful feudal overlords of Scotland. In addition to this, they committed to undertaking military service on behalf of the English king when summoned, alongside 200 Scottish men-at-arms. In exchange for help in securing the Scottish throne for his family, Balliol further agreed to cede £20,000 worth of territory and fortifications, which were to be permanently annexed by England. A further clause stated that Edward Balliol promised to treat a dethroned David II equitably and proposed a potential marriage between the almost fifty-year-old Balliol and Edward III’s then eleven-year-old sister, Joan, in the event that she chose to repudiate her marriage to David.
It is probable that this agreement was genuine rather than a strangely belligerent offer meant to tempt Edward III into granting his support. It is difficult to imagine that Edward III would have allowed the Disinherited to invade Scotland and tacitly provide them with the necessary financial backing without establishing some method of benefiting from their success. The specificity of the terms in regard to the amount of territory to be ceded to England and the conditions surrounding the military service owed by the Scottish king suggest that they are the product of extended negotiations.
Balliol must have been keenly aware that the surrendering of Scottish territory to England would be hugely unpopular amongst the Scottish nobility whose support he eventually hoped to win. That he would risk further isolating them by publishing a hitherto secret agreement with Edward III is compelling evidence that he had become convinced that he required English aid to properly establish himself as King of Scotland despite the current lack of significant opposition. This may well have reflected the cash-strapped, would-be king’s difficulties in continuing to pay the Disinherited army without resorting to plunder and extortion which would have further alienated his potential subjects.
The Yuletide Massacre at Annan
While Edward III pondered the issue and attempted to solicit the support of a rather uncooperative English parliament, Edward Balliol agreed to a winter truce with David II’s caretakers. He did so on the understanding that the truce would last until early February when a parliament could be convened which would have the authority to discuss a more permanent agreement. Content that matters would rest where they lay until February, Edward withdrew from Roxburghshire and prepared to celebrate Christmas in Annan in the south of Galloway. From there, most of the Disninherited’s carefully scraped together-army returned to their respective homes, scattered across the north of England.
The keystone of the Disinherited’s unprecedented success up until this point had been their audacity. Edward had in settling down for the winter, bartered away the strategic initiative that had in a few months seen him rise from French prisoner to anointed king. Worse still, he had badly underestimated the resolve of his enemies and the extraordinary lengths they would go to thwart the return of the Disinherited.
On the 16th December, Archibald Douglas, who had succeeded the captured Andrew de Moray as Guardian of Scotland, reneged on the ceasefire and fell upon Annan with a considerable contingent of troops. In contrast to his earlier failure at Jedburgh, this attack was a spectacular success. The Disinherited, confident in the sanctity of the truce, were literally caught in bed and several hundred of them were remorselessly slain. Amongst the losses were such senior members as Walter Comyn, Roger de Mowbray and Edward’s brother and immediate heir, Henry Balliol. Edward only escaped by breaking down a partitioning wall in his accommodation and fleeing half-dressed into the winter shrouded Galwegian countryside. Earl Edward Bruce of Carrick was captured and after narrowly escaping summary execution was allowed to make peace with his relatives and rather sheepishly return to the Bruce fold.
For all the ease with which they had been achieved, the Disinherited’s territorial gains in Scotland were brittle. They were ultimately predicated on the half-hearted or outright coerced cooperation of those regions that had fallen directly in the path of the Disinherited army. With the defeat at Annan and the threat of the Disinherited army lifted, Balliol’s authority in Scotland, such as it was, simply dissolved overnight. All the hard-won gains made by the Disinherited over the past couple of months had come to nothing, all as a result of the new Guardians’ decisive, if treacherous, raid.
Balliol emerged, deeply bedraggled, a few days after the disaster in Carlisle where he was afforded a warm welcome. It then appears that he dispatched envoys to York where Edward III was holding a session of the English Parliament. Indeed, many of the now scattered Disinherited would have been summoned to attend the Parliament as land owning members of the English nobility. The convening of this Parliament in York was far from a coincidence, and it was dominated by the question of how to react to the unfolding events in Scotland. Edward III made a great show of soliciting the advice of Parliament, but when they remained stubbornly non-committal or outrightly leery of renewed war, he began preparing for the invasion of Scotland anyway.
Edward III would support Balliol in securing the throne of Scotland, but he was determined to negotiate as high a price as possible, eagerly taking advantage of his ally’s now greatly reduced circumstances. Rather than £20,000 worth of land scattered across the borders, the English king would now aim to annex the majority of southern Scotland, including Edinburgh, Selkirk, Roxburghshire, Dumfries and Peebles. The desperate Edward Balliol had little recourse but to accept in the hopes that his hawkish English allies could place him on the throne of a now greatly reduced kingdom.
James Turner has recently completed his doctoral studies at Durham University before which he attended the University of Glasgow. Deeply afraid of numbers and distrustful of counting, his main research interests surround medieval aristocratic culture and identity. You can follow James on X/Twitter @HistorySchmstry
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