Robert II. was crowned at Scone on March 26, 1371. He was elderly,
jovial, pacific, and had little to fear from England when the deaths of
Edward III. and the Black Prince left the crown to the infant Richard II.
There was fighting against isolated English castles within the Scottish
border, to amuse the warlike Douglases and Percies, and there were
truces, irregular and ill kept. In 1384 great English and Scottish raids
were made, and gentlemen of France, who came over for sport, were
scurvily entertained, and (1385) saw more plundering than honest fighting
under James, Earl of Douglas, who merely showed them an army that, under
Richard II., burned Melrose Abbey and fired Edinburgh, Perth, and Dundee.
Edinburgh was a town of 400 houses. Richard insisted that not more than
a third of his huge force should be English Borderers, who had no idea of
hitting their Scottish neighbours, fathers-in-law and brothers-in-law,
too hard. The one famous fight, that of Otterburn (August 15, 1388), was
a great and joyous passage of arms by moonlight. The Douglas fell, the
Percy was led captive away; the survivors gained advancement in renown
and the hearty applause of the chivalrous chronicler, Froissart. The
oldest ballads extant on this affair were current in 1550, and show
traces of the reading of Froissart and the English chroniclers.

In 1390 died Robert II. Only his youth was glorious. The reign of his
son, Robert III. (crowned August 14, 1390), was that of a weakling who
let power fall into the hands of his brother, the Duke of Albany, or his
son David, Duke of Rothesay, who held the reins after the Parliament (a
Parliament that bitterly blamed the Government) of January 1399. (With
these two princes the title of Duke first appears in Scotland.) The
follies of young David alienated all: he broke his betrothal to the
daughter of the Earl of March; March retired to England, becoming the man