Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 07.djvu/120

 to England, and was immediately employed in the north, fortifying Berwick and other towns against the Pretender. Here his ‘Memoirs' abruptly break off; but we learn from the ‘advertisement’ prefixed to the edition of 1782, that he retired the same year (1745) to his house in the country, where he died in 1757. His ‘Memoirs,' his only literary work, were originally written, as he tells us, in German, his native language, and were translated by him into English in 1755. They were printed at London in 1782 for his widow, and are favourably noticed in the ‘Monthly Review’ for that year. They are pleasantly written, and show very close and intelligent observation.

 BRUCE, ROBERT I (d. 1094?), was an ancestor of the king of Scotland who made the name of Bruce or Brus famous. The family is a singular example of direct male descent in the Norman baronage, and it is necessary to distinguish with care the different individuals who bore the same surname, and during eight generations the christian name of Robert. The surname has been traced by some genealogists beyond Normandy to a Norse follower of its conqueror Rollo, a descendant of whose brother, Einar, earl of Orkney, called Brusi (which means in old Norse a goat), is said to have accompanied Rollo and built a castle in the diocese of Coutances. A later Brusi, son of Sigurd the Stout, was Earl of Orkney, and died 1031. But the genealogy cannot be accepted. The name is certainly territorial, and is most probably derived from the lands and castle of Brin or Bruis, of which a few remains in the shape of vaults and foundations can still be traced between Cherbourg and Vallonges. More than one de Bruce came with the Conqueror to England, and the contingent of ‘li sires de Bréaux’ is stated at two hundred men (, Collectanea, i. 202). Their services were rewarded by forty-three manors in the East and West, and fifty-one in the North Riding of Yorkshire—upwards of 40,000 acres of land, which fell to the lot of Robert de Bruce I, the head of the family. Of the Yorkshire manors the chief was Skelton in Cleveland, not far from Whitby, the salt of the elder English branch of the Brnces after the younger migrated to Scotland and became lords of Annandale.

 BRUCE, ROBERT II (1078?–1141), was son of Robert I, and companion of David I of Scotland at the court of Henry I. He received from David I a grant of Annandale, then called Strath Annent, by a charter c. 1124 (A. P. Scot. i. 92, from the original in Brit. Mus. Cartæ Antiquæ, xviii. 45). It was bounded by the lands of Donegal, of Strathnith (Nithsdale), and those of Ranulf de Meschines, earl of Chester, in Cumberland, and embraced the largest part of the county of Dumfries. Like David, a benefactor of the church, Robert de Bruce founded a monastery of canons regular at Guisburn in Cleveland with the consent of his wife Agnes and Adam his eldest son. The church of Middleburgh, with certain lands attached to it, was given by him to the monks of Whitby as a cell of Guisburn, and his manors of Appleton and Hornby to the monks of St. Mary at York. Along with Bernard de Baliol of Barnard Castle he tried to make terms between David and the English barons before the battle of the Standard in 1138; but failing in this attempt he renounced his Scotch fief of Annandale, and, notwithstanding his affection for David, fought with zeal on the side of Stephen. He died in 1141, and left by Agnes, daughter of Fulk Pagnel of Carlton, two sons. The elder, Adam, succeeded to Skelton and his other English lands, which continued in the family till 1271, when, on the death of Peter Bruce, constable of Scarborough, without issue, they were parted between his four sisters. His second son, Robert de Bruce III, saved the Scotch fief of Annandale either by ioining David I, if a tradition that he was taken prisoner by his father at the battle of the Standard can be relied on, or by obtaining its snbsequent restoration from David or Malcolm IV.

 BRUCE, ROBERT III (fl. 1138–1189?), second son of Robert II, and so called Le Meschin or the Cadet, was the founder of the Scottish branch. He held the Annandale fief, with Lochmaben as its chief messuage, for the service of a hundred knights during the reigns of David I, Malcolm IV, and William the Lion, who confirmed it by a charter in 1166. He paid escuage for the manor of Hert in the bishopric of Durham in 1170, which he is said to have received from his father to supply him with wheat, which did not grow in Annandale. The date of his death is uncertain, but he must have survived the year 1189, when he settled a long-pending dispute with the see of Glasgow by an 