daughter of King Alexander II. Patrick Galithly, son of Henry Galithly, natural son of King William the Lion. William de Ros, 1st Baron de Ros, son of Robert de Ros, son of William de Ros of Hamlake, son of Isabella, natural daughter of King William the Lion. William de Vesci, Baron de Vesci, son of William de Vesci, son of Margaret, illegitimate daughter of King William the Lion. Patrick Dunbar, 7th Earl of Dunbar, son of Patrick, 6th Earl of Dunbar, son of Patrick, 5th Earl of Dunbar, son of Ada, natural daughter of King William the Lion. Roger de Mandeville, son of Agatha, daughter of Aufrica, an alleged natural daughter of William de Say, son of Aufrica, an alleged natural daughter of King William the Lion. Robert de Pinkeney, son of Henry, son of Alicia, daughter of Marjorie, an alleged natural daughter of Henry, Earl of Huntingdon. Eric II, King of Norway, father of Queen Margaret and son-in-law of King Alexander III. Claims In reality only four of these men had genuine claims to the throne: John Hastings, John Balliol, Robert de Brus and Floris V. Of these only Bruce and Balliol had realistic grounds on which to claim the crown. The rest merely wished to have their claims put on the legal record. John Hastings, an Englishman with extensive estates in Scotland, could not succeed to the throne by any of the normal rules governing feudal legacy and instead had his lawyers argue that Scotland was not a true kingdom at all, based, amongst other things, on the fact that Scots kings were traditionally neither crowned nor anointed. As such, by the normal rules of feudal or customary law the kingdom should be split amongst the direct descendants of the co-heiresses of David I. Unsurprisingly, a court made up of Scots nobles rejected these arguments out of hand. John Balliol had the simplest, and thus, by some measure, the strongest claim of the four. By the tradition of primogeniture, he was the rightful claimant (his mother Devorguilla of Galloway having been eldest surviving child of Margaret of Huntingdon, Lady of Galloway, herself the eldest daughter of Earl David of Huntingdon), and that tradition had become steadily entrenched in customary inheritance law both in England and Scotland over the preceding two centuries. Balliol also argued that the Kingdom of Scotland was, as royal estate, indivisible as an entity. This