The Black Douglases had risen to power on the bones of the Wars of Scottish Independence, where Sir James Douglas served Robert the Bruce so faithfully that he was sent to carry Bruce's heart on crusade. By the 1450s their head, James Douglas the 9th Earl of Douglas, controlled enough land and men to act like a rival king. James II had decided that could not continue. In 1452 the king stabbed William, 8th Earl of Douglas, to death with his own hand at Stirling Castle, an act of royal violence that did not end the family but began the long campaign to break it. By the spring of 1455 the king's forces had taken the Douglas stronghold at Abercorn, and key allies like the Hamiltons had switched sides. James, the head of the family, had fled to England to plead for help. He left his three younger brothers in charge of what remained.

The army that fought for the king at Arkinholm was assembled from the Border families the Black Douglases had dominated for generations: Johnstones, Carruthers, Maxwells, Scotts. Some accounts credit George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, head of the rival Red Douglas line and third cousin to the Black Douglases, with the command. Other accounts give the leadership to John Johnstone of Annandale, who had just inherited his lairdship from his father that year. Either way, the point of the army was its composition: men who had been Douglas tenants and Douglas vassals, now riding against them. The Black Douglases had run out of friends. The Borders, long their unquestioned heartland, had turned. They were three brothers with a few hundred men against a coalition assembled to destroy them, and that is exactly what happened.

The battle itself was brief and brutal in the manner of medieval Border warfare. Archibald, Earl of Moray, was killed on the field; his head was struck off and presented to the king as proof and trophy. Hugh, Earl of Ormonde, was captured, dragged back to the royal court, and executed shortly afterwards. John, Lord of Balvenie, the youngest brother, escaped over the border into England. The 9th Earl of Douglas, still in England seeking aid he would never receive, was now the last Black Douglas of any consequence. Within months the family was attainted, their remaining castles fell, and the great Black Douglas inheritance evaporated. The Red Douglases, those distant cousins of the Earl of Angus, received the title of Earl of Douglas as their reward. The original Douglas lands in Douglasdale went with it.

Arkinholm settled a question that had hung over Scottish politics since the death of Robert the Bruce: could the crown survive a magnate family powerful enough to challenge it? The answer turned out to be yes, but only after a generation of murder, attainder, and battle. James II was killed five years later by an exploding cannon at the siege of Roxburgh, never to see the centralised monarchy he had been fighting for fully take shape. The work fell to his successors. Smaller rewards trickled out for decades. Thomas Carruthers, second son of the 3rd Laird of Holmains, received a charter for the lands of Corry in 1484, twenty-nine years after Arkinholm, for services rendered that day. The Border families had won themselves a new place in the kingdom by destroying the old one. The Corries, the modern Scottish folk group, later wrote a song about the battle, words by George Weir and music by Roy Williamson, keeping the names of three dead brothers in circulation 500 years later.