55.
** Rymer, vol.ii.p, 559.
The whole amount of his authorities during the Saxon period, when stripped of the bombast and inaccurate style of the monkish historians, is, that the Scots had sometimes been defeated by the English, had received peace on disadvantageous terms, had made submissions to the English monarch, and had even perhaps fallen into some dependence on a power which was so much superior, and which they had not at that time sufficient force to resist.

His authorities from the Norman period were, if possible, still less conclusive: the historians indeed make frequent mention of homage done by the northern potentate; but no one of them says that it was done for his kingdom; and several of them declare, in express terms that it was relative only to the fiefs which he enjoyed south of the Tweed;[*] in the same manner, as the king of England himself swore fealty to the French monarch, for the fiefs which he inherited in France.

And to such scandalous shifts was Edward reduced, that he quotes a passage from Hoveden[**] where it is asserted that a Scottish king had done homage to England; but he purposely omits the latter part of the sentence, which expresses that this prince did homage for the lands which he held in England.
When William, king of Scotland, was taken prisoner in the battle of Alnwick, he was obliged, for the recovery of his liberty, to swear fealty to the victor for his crown itself.

The deed was performed according to all the rites of the feudal law: the record was preserved in the English archives, and is mentioned by all the historians: but as it is the only one of the kind, and as historians speak of this superiority as a great acquisition gained by the fortunate arms of Henry II.,[***] there can remain no doubt that the kingdom of Scotland was, in all former periods, entirely free and independent.

Its subjection continued a very few years: King Richard, desirous, before his departure for the Holy Land, to conciliate the friendship of William, renounced that homage, which, he says in express terms, had been extorted by his father; and he only retained the usual homage which had been done by the Scottish princes for the lands which they held in England.
* Hoveden, p.