Footnotes

ROBERT THE BRUCE REWARDS HIS LOYAL SUPPORTER: An important document granting land at Achtertyre in Forfarshire to Sir William Oliphant for his services in the wars of independence.

Sir William Oliphant of Dupplin and Aberdalgie (d.1329), was a veteran of the Battle of Dunbar of 1296 and the siege of Stirling Castle of 1304 where his cousin (of the same name, d.1313) was governor, and was imprisoned by the English on both occasions before finally returning to Scotland in 1313. After swearing allegiance to Robert the Bruce, possibly after the battle of Bannockburn, he was to receive '...a number of grants of land throughout the reign and put his seal (three crescents) to the declaration of Arbroath of 1320. In the final years of the reign he also performed the office of escheator...' (Fiona Watson, ODNB). In fact Oliphant and three of the witnesses to this document, Walter Stewart and the Earls of Strathearn and Fife, had put seals to the Declaration, a letter sent in April 1320 by fifty-one Scottish nobles and magnates to Pope John XXII in Avignon, declaring Scotland's status as an independent sovereign state and defending her right to defend herself when attacked. It asserted that Scotland had always been independent, that Edward I had unjustly attacked Scotland and committed atrocities, and that Robert the Bruce had been the one to deliver the nation from this peril. The lands awarded to Oliphant by Robert I, together with those acquired by inheritance and advantageous marriage alliances meant that the family held substantial swathes of property across Perthshire and Forfarshare and estates in Fife, Kincardineshire and Midlothian which, in later years, were used as an endowment for different branches of descendants.

The document is dated the "20 year of his reigne" from the year 1306 when Robert the Bruce was crowned at Scone. Years of struggle ensued after his coronation, culminating in Scottish victory at the battle of Bannockburn in June 1314 and the treaty of Edinburgh of March 1328 by which the government of the young Edward III, under his mother Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, granted Scotland unqualified recognition as a sovereign nation.

This document is well-known to scholars but its whereabouts was, for nearly a century, unknown. It originally formed part of a group of seven writs (including one other in the name of Robert I dated 26 December 1317 granting lands at Newtyle and Kinurney to Oliphant in return for the services of one knight), passing to Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1636/8-1681), Lord Advocate, in 1682 from David Hallyburton of Pitcur, and thence by descent, as part of the so-called Mackenzie-Wharncliffe Charter-Chest at Belmont Castle in Perthshire, to Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, 3rd Baron & 1st Earl of Wharncliffe (1827-1899). The records from Belmont Castle were sold by Sotheby's, 9 June 1920.

It was first published in the Fifth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts of 1876 and the Latin text was included in Joseph Anderson's, The Oliphants in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1876, appendix 2) where it was noted that 'the service of three archers was commuted by King David II into a reddendum of 'three broad arrows' [on the feast of St Martin yearly at Ochtertyre] in 1364'. He also points out that on 8 March 1326, a few days before the date of our document, Oliphant had been present at the Parliament held at Holyrood. It was then printed in English and illustrated by J.W. Barty, Ancient Deeds and other Writs in the Mackenzie-Wharncliffe Charter-Chest (Edinburgh, 1906, appendix III, 131 and plate III) who commented that the writs were 'of exceptional interest and bear evidence to the fact that the lands of Newtyle, Kinpurney and Auchtertyre, and Balcraig had been the personal property of the great national hero, Robert the Bruce'.