Transactions. 167 
Baliol’s aims. In August, 1332, he was victorious at Duplin, and 
in September was crowned at Scone, King of Scotland by the 
grace of Edward ITT. 
As the winter advanced, he journeyed south with his followers— 
Till Anand held thai southward syne.* 
On 15th December he lay with a small army at Annan. He 
had arrived there on the 13th, and meant to stay till 
Christmas.j The fortunes of war proverbially uncertain were 
doomed to fall out otherwise. On the night of the 15th the young 
Har] of Mar, the Steward of Scotland, Sir Thomas Fraser, and Sir 
Archibald Douglas secretly assembled 1000 horse at Moffat. t 
Kre day broke they had ridden to Annan. Could they only fall 
suddenly upon the puppet King and his Englishmen it would be 
a stalwart stroke for Scotland! Fate favoured the enterprise. 
Baliol and his Englishmen were in their beds never dreaming of 
danger. They were, perhaps, as a contemporary$ states, over-secure 
in consequence of the victories they had previously obtained. 
On the morning of 16th December the band of Scots burst upon 
them ‘‘in the dawyng” of the day.|| There was stout fight 
shewn, but the surprise was too thorough to be withstood. 
English chronicle prides itself on the vigour of the resistance of 
the naked men who gave so good an account of themselves that 
no fewer than 30 of the Scots were slain. At least 100 of the 
adherents of Baliol were slain, amongst them several Scottish 
knights. Baliol himself had a narrow escape. Like the man in 
the rhyme with one shoe off and the other shoe on, he had to 
flee with his toilet incomplete. The national contempt for the 
Baliols—the day of the Dumfries County Council? was not yet— 
found expression in the satisfaction with which Scottish chronicle 
records the flight of this scion of their house, who soon afterwards 
*Wyntoun, viii. ch. 26, line 3677. 
+Chronicles of Edward I. and Edward IT. (B.8.), ii., 109-110 ; Chron. 
Lanercost, 271. One authority says he had appointed a Parliament to be 
held there. Anyghton in Decem Scriptores, 2562. 
+Bower, Scotichronicon, ii., 308. 
§Chron. Lanercost, 271. 
|The battle is described in Wyntown, viii. ch., 26; Chron. Lanercost, 
270-1; Scalacronica, 161; Decem Scriptores, 2562; Chron. Hd. I. and 
Hd. I. (B.8.), ti., 109-110 ; Bower, ii., 308 ; Leland changed a defeat into 
a victory ; Scalacronica, 295. 
Chron. -Lanercost, 271. 
Which with a deplorable lack of feeling for history has, in defiance of 
the Lyon King of Arms, put the armorial bearing of the Baliols into the 
county seal. 
