William the Lion in 1190, when he sold the Scottish king a release of certain duties of homage in return for the sum of 10,000 marks. But the agreement of Richard and William had been drawn up in such an unbusiness-like manner that no one could say exactly what it covered. [Sidenote: =Edward's arbitration.--Balliol and Bruce.=] King Edward was determined to put an end to this uncertainty, and, as a preliminary to accepting the post of arbitrator in the Scottish succession dispute, required that the regents and all the nobles of the northern realm should acknowledge his complete suzerainty over the whole kingdom. After some hesitation they consented. Edward made a tour through Edinburgh, Stirling, and St. Andrews, and there received the homage of the whole nobility of Scotland. He then appointed a court of arbitration to sit at Berwick, and adjudicate on the rights of the thirteen claimants to the crown; it consisted of eighty Scots and twenty-four Englishmen. The court found that of serious claims to the crown there were only two--those of John Balliol and Robert Bruce, each of whom descended in the female line from the old King David I., who had died in 1153. The positions of Balliol and Bruce were closely similar: they were descended from two Anglo-Norman barons of the north country, who had married two sisters, Margaret and Isabella, the great-granddaughters of David I. Both of them were as much English as Scotch in blood and breeding. Balliol was Lord of Barnard Castle, in Durham; Bruce had been Sheriff of Cumberland, and had long served King Edward as chief justice of the King's Bench. Like so many of the Scottish barons, they were equally at home on either side of the border. The point of difficulty to decide between them was that, while Balliol descended from the elder of the two co-heiresses, Bruce was a generation nearer to the parent stem, and claimed to have a preference on this account by Scottish usage. THE SCOTTISH SUCCESSION IN 1292.