John MacDougall of Lorn(c. 1265–c. 1317)

John MacDougall of Lorn, called by his Gaelic sobriquet *Bacach* (the lame), was born about 1265 at Dunstaffnage Castle on the Sound of Lorn, eldest son of Alexander MacDougall, Lord of Lorn, and a daughter of John I Comyn of Badenoch. The MacDougalls descended through the male line from Dougall, eldest son of Somerled by his marriage to Ragnhild of Mann; Clan Dougall held the central western seaboard from the mainland of Lorn out across Mull, the Garvellach Isles and the smaller western Hebrides. Their senior cousins the MacDonalds of Islay held the southern half of the Hebrides through Donald, second son of Somerled. The political reality through the thirteenth century had been MacDougall seniority and MacDonald cadetry, and the Comyn maternal connection through John's mother into the Comyn line of Badenoch was the political fact that defined the next twelve years of his life.

He inherited the lordship of Lorn from his father in or shortly before 1306 on Alexander's retirement to the Dominican friary at Inchcolm. Clan Dougall's sea-power in the western seaboard had run for three generations and was, on the eve of the Wars of Scottish Independence, the largest single Gaelic-political bloc on the western coast outside the MacDonald lordship. The wars opened complicated. The Bruce killing of John III Comyn at the Greyfriars Church Dumfries on 10 February 1306 broke John MacDougall's political relationship with the new king of Scots: the Comyn whom Bruce had killed had been John MacDougall's first cousin and the senior figure of the political bloc the MacDougalls were the western anchor of. From the killing forward he fought against Bruce as a family obligation as much as a political position. The Bruce coronation at Scone in March 1306 was the first event in a Scottish civil war that the MacDougalls treated as the continuation of a family blood-feud.

The Battle of Methven on 19 June 1306 broke the Bruce field army outside Perth. Bruce came west across the next four weeks with about three hundred surviving men, intending to take the western mainland to the seaboard and the sea to the Hebridean MacDonalds for shelter. He had to cross the Pass of Brander, the narrow defile between Cruachan Beann and the north shore of Loch Etive, to reach the open Lorn country. John MacDougall was waiting for him. The ambush at the Dalrigh field above Tyndrum (the *Dal Righ*, the king's meadow) on 11 August 1306 was the close-quarters fight the chroniclers handed down. The MacDougalls and a contingent of MacNabs and Camerons aligned with them attacked Bruce's party at the head of the pass. The party fought back and broke through to the western glens, but the king himself was attacked at the back of the fighting by three MacDougall *gillenedhain* (foster-brothers of John MacDougall, his closest household kinsmen). The chronicler John Barbour's *The Brus* (c. 1376, the standard fourteenth-century Scots verse account of the Wars) reports that one of the three clung to the cloak of Bruce as the king turned to fight and was killed by his mace; the cloak was wrenched off in the struggle, and the round silver brooch that pinned the cloak shut was carried away from the field by John MacDougall as the trophy of the engagement. The brooch is now called the Brooch of Lorn and is held by the MacDougall line at Dunollie House outside Oban to this day.

Bruce fled west to Rathlin in the autumn of 1306 and from there to the western Hebrides through the winter. The campaign of 1307 ran through the south-west of Scotland and culminated in the death of Edward I at Burgh-by-Sands on 7 July; the weakening of the English position under Edward II opened the campaigning ground for Bruce through 1308. The drive against the Comyn-allied lordships of the north and west came in the spring and summer. He defeated the Comyn earl of Buchan at Inverurie on 23 May, broke the Buchan lordship across the next eight weeks in the campaign the chroniclers called the Harrying of Buchan, and turned south-west to deal with the MacDougalls. The second Pass of Brander, on 15 August 1308, saw Bruce in person with about eight hundred men attacking the MacDougall position on the north shoulder of Cruachan Beann. John MacDougall directed the action from a Hebridean galley out on Loch Awe, on the principle that the senior cadet of Somerled's line should fight from the sea rather than from the ground. Bruce's cousin James Douglas led the assault up the north side of Cruachan and turned the MacDougall flank; the force broke and fled west to Dunstaffnage; the castle was taken by Bruce's siege machinery within ten days; John MacDougall took ship for English-occupied Cumberland.

He spent the last nine years of his life as a pensioner of the English Crown. Edward II appointed him Admiral of the Western Fleet of England in March 1311 in recognition of his sea-fighting record and gave him a small fleet of west-coast English galleys with which to harass the Scottish coast; he ran the western-coast war from English-held bases at Whitehaven and Bristol through 1311 to 1314 with mixed success. The Bannockburn defeat of June 1314 broke the English position in Scotland and broke the possibility of MacDougall restoration to Lorn. He was given a small annual pension of fifty pounds and rooms at the Tower of London (a set reserved for senior Scottish political exiles) and lived the last three years of his life as a court figure. He died at the Tower in or about 1317, in his early fifties; the place of his burial is unrecorded. The MacDougall succession passed to his son Ewan, who in 1334 made the political accommodation with Bruce's son David II that restored the family to a portion of the Lorn estate. The MacDougall name in the Scottish-side catalogue is the patronymic of Dougall (Gaelic *Dubh-gall*, the dark stranger, the Norse-Gaelic byname of the eldest son of Somerled); John Bacach carried it in the second generation of the Wars of Scottish Independence as Bruce's most consistent and most dangerous western enemy.