For instance, it clearly appears from another passage of this very letter of Richard, that the Scottish king held lands both in the county of Huntingdon and elsewhere in England; though the earldom of Huntingdon itself was then in the person of his brother David; and we know at present of no other baronies which William held.
It cannot be expected that we should now be able to specify all his fees which he either possessed or claimed in England; when it is probable that the two monarchs themselves and their ministers would at that very time have differed in the list: the Scottish king might possess some to which his right was disputed; he might claim others which he did not possess; and neither of the two kings was willing to resign his pretensions by a particular enumeration.
A late author of great industry and learning, but full of prejudices, and of no penetration, Mr.Carte, has taken advantage of the undefined terms of the Scotch homage, and has pretended that it was done for Lothian and Galloway: that is, all the territories of the country now called Scotland, lying south of the Clyde and Forth.

But to refute this pretension at once, we need only consider, that if these territories were held in fee of the English kings, there would, by the nature of the feudal law as established in England, have been continual appeals from them to the courts of the lord paramount; contrary to all the histories and records of that age.

We find that, as soon as Edward really established his superiority, appeals immediately commenced from all parts of Scotland: and that king, in his writ to the king's bench, considers them as a necessary consequence of the feudal tenure.

Such large territories also would have supplied a considerable part of the English armies, which never could have escaped all the historians.

Not to mention that there is not any instance of a Scotch prisoner of war being tried as a rebel, in the frequent hostilities between the kingdoms, where the Scottish armies were chiefly filled from the southern counties.
Mr.Carte's notion with regard to Galloway, which comprehends, in the language of that age, or rather in that of the preceding, most of the south-west counties of Scotland; his notion, I say, rests on so slight a foundation, that it scarcely merits being refuted.