By the autumn of 1307 Robert Bruce had been King of Scotland for less than two years, and his throne was extraordinarily contested. The English under the new King Edward II - his father Edward I, the Hammer of the Scots, had died in July - regarded him as a rebel and a murderer, and had pursued him through the Highlands. The Scots themselves were divided. The Comyn family, kin to the John Comyn whom Bruce had killed in a Dumfries church in February 1306, were Bruce's bitter domestic enemies. Their head, John Comyn, Earl of Buchan, controlled most of the north-east. Bruce had won a victory at Loudoun Hill against the English in May 1307 and was determined now to turn on his Scottish opponents while Edward II proved less effective than his father. He moved north-east in late autumn, intent on Buchan's heartland.

Then Bruce fell ill. The chroniclers do not name the illness, but it was severe enough that he had to be carried in a litter. The royal army stopped at Slioch, a small settlement in the hilly country south-west of modern Huntly, to rest. The Earl of Buchan saw his moment. Bruce's force had been larger; if the king was incapacitated, perhaps it could be broken now. Buchan raised troops from his Aberdeenshire estates and moved on Slioch with what manpower he could muster. By Christmas Day his archers were within bowshot of the royal camp, where command had passed to Bruce's brother Edward Bruce, the king himself being too weak to fight. The medieval king on Christmas Day in his sickbed; the cousin's son arriving to settle a blood feud. The setting could not have been more Scottish.

The historian A. F. Murison summarised what followed precisely: "On three successive days there occurred skirmishes between bodies of archers, Buchan's men getting the worst of the encounter day after day. Buchan's force, however, was continuously getting additions, while Bruce was getting pinched with hunger." That sentence carries everything you need to know. The royal force was winning the actual fighting. They were also starving. Buchan's army was losing the arrow exchanges but gaining recruits hour by hour from the surrounding country. Eventually Bruce's commanders made the only sensible decision. They placed the king in his litter, formed his men into a defensive marching order, and moved slowly north to Strathbogie, refusing all engagement. Buchan's force, having failed to break them, gave up the chase and dispersed back to their homes for the rest of the festival.

Buchan tried once more, days later, and again found Bruce's force too strong to attack. Then winter closed in. Bruce sheltered, slowly recovered, and used the months of recuperation to reorganise. By spring 1308 he was back in the saddle and his army back on the offensive. He took castles, gathered men, and moved on Inverurie, the heart of Comyn country, with the king carried in his litter at the centre of the formation. There, at the Battle of Inverurie in May 1308, the patience paid off. Buchan was defeated decisively. Bruce then unleashed what came to be called the Harrying of Buchan - a brutal scorched-earth campaign that destroyed the Comyn estates and broke Comyn power in the north-east forever. The civil war was over. The English war could now be fought as a unified Scottish kingdom.

The Battle of Slioch is officially a minor skirmish. The casualties were modest, no field was won, the day ended in withdrawal. And yet, if Buchan had broken Bruce's army on Christmas Day 1307 with the king already too weak to rise, the line of Scottish history would have run differently. There would have been no Bannockburn six and a half years later, no Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, possibly no independent Scottish kingdom at all. The skirmish settled who had the will to stay in the field. A sick king lying in a litter, surrounded by archers who refused to break, on a freezing Christmas in the Aberdeenshire hills - that was a victory of a kind, even if no contemporary recognised it. Bruce lived, his army held, and the next spring he came back.