Evening lecture by Dr Iain MacInnes, Senior Lecturer in Scottish History at University of the Highlands and Islands.

Many people know something about the history of Scotland’s fight to regain its independence from England during the wars led by William Wallace, Robert Bruce, and others. Indeed, this period is an indelible part of Scotland’s history that has been represented in TV, film, and fiction, to further popular knowledge and understanding of the conflict. But much less is known about what happened next.

Far fewer people know that war recommenced in Scotland only three years after the death of Robert Bruce; that a king of a different family was crowned in Scotland in 1332; that civil war broke out in the kingdom once more, across its extent; and that some of the assumptions of “what we know” about the first war are actually not as cut and dried as we might assume them to be. Indeed, it is little understood that the war that recommenced in 1332 was a direct continuation of unresolved issues from the previous conflict, and that Scotland’s history could have taken a very different route indeed after 1332, than it eventually did.

This lecture will, then, look at the period of the Second War of Independence and expand on the theme of Scottish civil war as a key element within it. It will discuss why war came about, who was involved in its prosecution, and the threat that such people provided to the existing order. And it will propose that we should reconsider this period as one that is indelibly linked to the actions and individuals of the previous war, and that it should also lead to our reconsideration of accepted aspects of that conflict.