Clan Bruce · c. 1306
Bruce and the spider
Defeated and hunted in 1306, the king is said to have watched a spider rebuild its web seven times — and resolved to do the same.
Draft entry · awaiting review
After his crowning at Scone in 1306 Robert the Bruce was defeated at Methven and Dalrigh within months. Excommunicated by Rome, with a price on his head, his wife and daughter taken, three of his brothers executed, he spent the winter in hiding — by tradition on Rathlin Island off the Antrim coast.
There, the story goes, he watched a spider try to fix its broken web. Six times it failed. The seventh time the strand held. Bruce took the omen, returned to Scotland in early 1307, and resumed the campaign that would end at Bannockburn seven years later.
The tale is not contemporary. The earliest written version is in Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather (1827), and Scott himself acknowledges hearing it as folklore. What is contemporary — in chronicles written within a generation of the events — is the bare fact: a king at the end of his options went back into the field, and won.