Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton agreed
Edinburgh, Edinburgh and the Lothians The 17th of March 1328 AD
The struggles of Robert the Bruce to control his own kingdom and to confirm its independence of the English were finally realised in 1328. Robert I for his country, and the dowager Queen Isabella along with Earl Mortimer on behalf of the English child king Edward III , signed The Treaty of Edinburgh at Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh on March 17 1328.
It had been a long struggle: the Bruce had killed his own cousin to secure the throne of Scotland; he had won the great victory of Bannockburn in 1314; and in 1323 had obtained a 13-year truce, though the English continued to harry Scottish shipping under the cover of this being privateer activity. The final push to get the English to consider a lasting settlement came when the Scots invaded England in 1327.
By the terms of the Treaty of Edinburgh (ratified six weeks later at Northampton ) Scotland paid their neighbours £20,000 as part of a bargain where the English agreed to Scotland’s independence, acknowledged Robert the Bruce as undisputed King of that country, and settled on a border as it had existed 50 years previously (thus regaining the interminably exchanged Berwick for the Scots).
Part of the glue to bind the treaty was the contracting of a marriage between Robert’s son David, then four, and Edward III’s little sister Joan, a more mature six, a marriage that did indeed take place later in the year.
For all the solemn promises before witnesses, and the fancy and supposedly binding words in the treaty (written in French), when Robert I died in 1329 the peace began to crumble and within a few years the two countries were again at war.
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