Louis IV of the House of Wittelsbach…

The Scots have by 1314 recovered all the castles controlled by English garrisons except Berwick and Stirling.

Edward II leads a large and lavishly equipped English army, heavy with cavalry, north in an effort to relieve Robert the Bruce’s months-long siege of Stirling Castle.

Bruce creates a two thousand-foot front by positioning eight thousand men on a hill at Bannockburn, near Stirling, placing his left flank in dense woods and his right on a bend the brook.

The English must not only advance up a hill but must also cross a bog in order to reach it.

Edward gives the order to advance on June 24; as the heavily armored knights advance through a hail of Scottish spears and arrows, they begin to sink in the marsh while Scottish spearmen drive back Edward’s archers.

The English, although superior in number by a factor of three to one, suffer heavy losses against the Scottish pikemen and soon retreat with the Scottish infantry in pursuit.

Edward panics and flees, followed by his surviving troops.

The Scots consider the victory a confirmation of their independence, but the obstinate Edward refuses to agree.

Edward Bruce, brother of Robert, had in 1315 invaded Ireland with six thousand men in pursuit of some hereditary claim to the earldom of Ulster.

After routing the earl’s forces near Connor and gaining the allegiance of the inhabitants of Connaught and West Meath, Edward is crowned High King in 1316.

Many Anglo-Irish support him, increasing his power base.

Edward the Bruce and his brother Robert had campaigned as far south as Limerick in 1317, but the heavy damage they inflicted has caused them to lose support in Ireland.

Failing to establish strongholds, they and their forces had been pushed back to Ulster by Anglo-Irish forces under Roger de Mortimer, English lord lieutenant.

Robert had returned to Scotland; Edward, emerging from Ulster in 1318, fights Mortimer at Faughard near Dundalk and dies here.

James Douglas, called the Black, has led continual Scottish raids into England from 1315 to 1318, while King Robert the Bruce campaigns in Ireland with his brother Edward.

The Scots recapture the sole remaining English stronghold at Berwick in 1318.

Walter, the sixth hereditary steward of the Scottish monarchy, had married Marjorie, the eldest daughter of Scotland’s King Robert the Bruce by his first wife, Isabella of Mar.

Edward Bruce had been named heir to the throne but he dies without legitimate children on December 3, 1318 in a battle near Dundalk in Ireland.

Marjorie by this time had died in a riding accident—probably in 1317.

Scotland’s Parliament honors the Bruce line with the passage of a 1318 decree that provides for the coronation of Bruce’s grandson should he die without a son.

That grandson will eventually be crowned Robert II of Scotland, the first king of the Stewart line.

The town of Harwich in Essex, whose name means "military settlement," from Old English here-wic, had received its charter in 1238, although there is evidence of earlier settlement—for example, a record of a chapel in 1177.

One of the Haven ports, located on the coast with the North Sea to the east, Harwich receives its first royal charter in 1319.

Its position on the estuaries of the Stour and Orwell rivers and its usefulness to mariners as the only safe anchorage between the Thames and the Humber leads to a long period of maritime significance, both civil and military.

Robert the Bruce dispatches a diversionary force commanded by Douglas in 1319 into Yorkshire, where at Myton, so many clergy and monks are involved in an Anglo-Scottish skirmish that the Scots call their victory “the chapter of Myton.”

William of Occam, or Ockham, after joining the Franciscans, studies at Oxford, where he encounters the thought of the late John Duns Scotus and where, from about 1319 to 1320, he writes a commentary on the “Sentences” of Peter Lombard.

Thomas, Earl of Lancaster—the son of Edmund Crouchback and Blanche of Artois— having led the baronial opposition to his cousin Edward II, had become England’s effective ruler by the time of Edward's decisive defeat at Bannockburn.

Edward recovers power, however, with the help of a new favorite, his chamberlain Hugh le Despenser.

Despenser, who has married a Clare and thereby gained control of Glamorgan on the Welsh border, becomes a target of the Marcher lords’ ire.

The Earl of Lancaster unites opposition against Despenser and maneuvers his exile.

Edward, furious, sends royal troops against the Marcher lords at Boroughbridge in 1322, defeating the rebel cavalry with dismounted men-at-arms and archers and afterwards executing Lancaster—whose title passes to his brother, Henry—and several of his associates.

Despenser returns to Edward’s side, and his allies help him to repeal the 1311 laws on the basis that they had been passed only by the nobles.

Robert the Bruce, in the eight years since his victory at Bannockburn, has avoided any major battle with the English.

Edward II invades Scotland in 1322, but Bruce’s forces engage the English at the Battle of Byland, winning a victory by a surprise attack and routing Edward from the battlefield to retreat into Yorkshire.