70 THE Brus INSCRIPTION AT ANNAN. 
adherents of King William the Lyon against the King of 
England, Henry II., in 1173. 
Chiefly interesting is the page of the Lanercost chronicle 
in which with many touches of intimate knowledge about 
the Brus family and about their dwelling-place the chronicler 
tells the strange story of St. Malachi’s curse, towards the 
middle of the twelfth century, fulminated equally upon the 
family and the town, or, as the chronicler calls it, the city 
(civitatem) of Annan itself. This legend, as singular in itself 
as in a certain corroboration of it, tells how by the piety of a 
lord of Annandale a century and a quarter after St. Malachi’s 
day the malediction pronounced upon the remote ancestral 
Brus in the time of David I. was appeased and extinguished 
by a grant at Clairvaux in France (the shrine of St. Bernard 
as well as of St. Malachi), whereby an annual rent was con- 
ferred on the famous French monastery to maintain for ever — 
three silver lamps over the grave or shrine of St Malachi. 
So said the chronicler. And the cartulary of Clairvaux was 
found actually to contain the charter by which about 1273, 
on his return from the crusade with Edward I., Robert de 
Brus made for the purpose stated the grant which the 
chronicler alleged (Scots Lore, p. 127). 
The Brus whom St. Malachi cursed was either the 
builder or the son of the builder of the Mote of Annan, and 
the Brus who appeased the offended saint was the competitor 
for the crown of Scotland, and the father of that Earl of 
Carrick and lord of Annandale whose son, the younger earl 
and lord, was to become King Robert the Bruce. 
The earliest known notice of the Brus inscribed stone at 
Annan occurs in the diary of Bishop Richard Pococke, who 
passed through Dumfriesshire in 1760, and whose Scottish 
journey is well described in his Tours in Scotland (Scottish 
History Society, 1887). The passage relative to the inscrip- 
tion occurs in his account of Annan, at page 35 :— 
‘“ But the most beautifull situation is the site of the 
house of Robert Bruce, grandfather to Robert Bruce, King 
of Scotland. It is on an eminence which commands a fine 
view of the river both up and down. It was an oblong 
Square defended by a deep fossee to the south and by a 
