Ayrshire > Volume 1

102 HISTORY OF AYRSHIRE
each of whom was to have eight bolls of meal and eight
merks a year, or, if there were but one, he was to have
the whole ; and the tax continues to be paid down till
now, although leprosy has long since ceased to trouble
the people of Scotland. Within comparatively recent
times, a scrofulously affected woman received a dole
from the Bruce bequest.
If one were deliberately to set himself to dissect the
character, the motives, the actions, of the greatest of all
the children of Carrick, it would not be at all difficult to
find incidents in his career that, taken by themselves
alone, would appear to cast a dark shadow upon his
fame. When Bruce was of the age of twenty-two, in
1296, he did fealty to Edward I. at Berwick ; the
following year he renewed his fealty, then took the field
with the insurgent Scots at Irvine, capitulated, renewed
his fealty, raided the lands of Douglas, gave his infant
daughter to Edward a hostage for hi loyalty, and was
received to the King's peace ; in 1299 he was one of the
three guardians of Scotland in name of Baliol, and the
same month attacked Edward's garrison in Lochmaben
Castle ; in 1302 he came with his tenants into the
King's peace and attended Edward's Parliament ; in
1303 he received advances of pay irom Edward and was
appointed his Sheriff of Lanark ; in 1304 he was
Constable, for the English monarch, of the castle of Ayr,
received Edward's thanks for good service, attended the
King's Parliament in St. Andrews, received Edward's
thanks for forwarding engines for the siege of Stirling,
and, while he was doing homage for his English estates,
joined in a league, with the Bishop of St. Andrews,
against the English ascendancy ; and in 1305 he was
with Edward at Westminster, attended his Parliament,
and was probably, according to Sir Herbert Maxwell, a
witness of the trial and execution of Wallace. Taken
by itself, that is not a nice or a consistent record. But
one must bear in mind the changing conditions in
Scotland at the time, the frequent apparently hopeless
lot of the Scottish cause, the certainty that consistent