Bruce

The Bruces were a Lowland Scottish house of Norman origin, named from Brix in Normandy; Robert de Brus followed David I to England in 1106 and received Annandale in Scotland. The fourth lord's marriage to Isobel of Huntingdon, William the Lion's niece, gave the family a crown claim, and the fifth lord was a leading claimant in the Great Cause of 1290, though Edward I awarded the throne to John Balliol.

Robert the Bruce revived the claim: after killing John Comyn he was crowned in 1306, defeated Edward II at Bannockburn in 1314, and won recognition of Scottish independence in the 1328 Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton, dying the next year at Dunfermline.

His son David II inherited young, went into French exile after Halidon Hill in 1333, and spent eleven years captive in England after Neville's Cross in 1346. When David died childless in 1371, the house's last male, the crown passed through Robert's daughter Marjorie to Robert II's Stewarts.