Bruce, Robert the

(1274-1329) better known as Robert the Bruce, freed Scotland from English control. Robert I, Scotland’s greatest king and war-leader has an equestrian statue in Bannockburn in a field, where the warring parties are believed to have camped on the night before the battle. The statue, unveiled in 1960, shows Bruce holding the axe with which he cleft the head of Henry de Bohun on the eve of battle, sending a shiver down the spines of his enemies and filling them with foreboding. The head of Bruce was modeled on measurements of Bruce’s skull following the re-discovery in 1821 of his skeletal remains in Dunfermline Abbey.