Note 52 — VI. SCOTTISH AFFAIRS—THE ARBITRATION—THE WAR. A.D. 1291–1296.

Wyntoun and Fordun, the earliest Scottish historians, writing at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries, bring in a fiction at this part of the story, telling us that Edward, during the arbitration, offered to give the crown to Bruce, if he would agree to hold it of him as feudal lord. But the fact is, as sir F. Palgrave has shown, that Bruce had already accepted the king as his feudal lord long before this meeting at Norham.