Ales Importa Un Pepino!

After Edward I defeated the Scots he deposed King John Balliol and appointed Englishmen to administer Scotland and the Church. With most of the nobility reluctant to oppose Edward, Wallace depended on the middling classes for support and they saw their fight being for the liberty of their country. This required Scots to explain who and what they were and to win support from European powers against Edward's claim to be the overlord of Scotland.

In 1301 a group of Scots clerics presented their case to the Pope, not only arguing that the English arguments were flawed, but also producing evidence that Scots and their kingdom had quite different and older origins than Edward made out. With continuing diplomatic pressure from England and the emergence of Robert the Bruce as the Scots leader, the community of the realm took up these ideas and refined them to produce in 1320 the Declaration of Arbroath: the final and lasting statement of Scottish independence.

This book examines these documents, placing them in their historical background and giving the original text of the most important of them.

Tom Dowds is Tutor in History at the Centre for Lifelong Learning, Strathclyde University, Glasgow.