s
defended by the flower of the Scottish nobility.

The Scots, sensible of the importance of this place, which, if taken,
laid their whole country open to the enemy, advanced with their main
army, under the command of the earls of Buchan, Lenox, and Marre, in
order to relieve it. Warrenne, not dismayed at the great superiority
of their number, marched out to give them battle. He attacked them with
great vigor; and as undisciplined troops, when numerous, are but
the more exposed to a panic upon any alarm, he soon threw them into
confusion, and chased them off the field with great slaughter. The loss
of the Scots is said to have amounted to twenty thousand men: the Castle
of Dunbar, with all its garrison, surrendered next day to Edward, who,
after the battle, had brought up the main body of the English, and
who now proceeded with an assured confidence of success. The Castle of
Roxburgh was yielded by James, steward of Scotland; and that nobleman,
from whom is descended the royal family of Stuart, was again obliged
to swear fealty to Edward. After a feeble resistance, the Castles of
Edinburgh and Stirling opened their gates to the enemy. All the southern
parts were instantly subdued by the English; and to enable them the
better to reduce the northern, whose inaccessible situation seemed to
give them some more security, Edward sent for a strong reenforcement of
Welsh and Irish, who, being accustomed to a desultory kind of war, were
the best fitted to pursue the fugitive Scots into the recesses of their
lakes and mountains. But the spirit of the nation was already broken by
their misfortunes and the feeble and timid Baliol, discontented with his
own subjects, and overawed by the English, abandoned all those resources
which his people might yet have possessed in this extremity. He hastened
to make his submissions to Edward, he expressed the deepest penitence
for his disloyalty to his liege lord; and he made a solemn and
irrevocable resignation of his crown into the hands of that monarch.[*]

* Rymer, vol. ii. p. 718. Walsing. p. 67. Heming. vo. i p.
99 Trivet, p. 292.

Edward marched northwards to Aberdeen and Elgin, without meeting an
enemy: no Scotchman approached him but to pay him submission and do him
homage: even the turbulent Highlanders, ever refractory to their own
princes, and averse to the restraint of laws, endeavored to prevent the
devastation of their country, by giving him early proofs of obedience: