Clan Sweeney supporters of the powerful MacDougall Lords of Lorne who supported John Balliol as patriots, as long as John was king of Scotland. After the murder of John Comyn, the nephew of Balliol, by Bruce in 1306, the First War of Scottish Independence became at one and the same time a civil war. The Balliol and Comyn parties taking the side of the English in opposition to Bruce, crowned Robert I of Scotland on 25 March 1306. This was an era of constantly shifting alliances, and in 1301 John MacSween was in alliance with Aonghus Óg Mac Domhnaill, Lord of Islay
Scots language mainly for geographical and cultural features, such as "ceilidh", "loch" and "clan". From the thirteenth century, the Early Scots language spread further into Scotland via the burghs, which were proto-urban institutions first established by King David I. In the fourteenth century Scotland, the growth in prestige of Early Scots and the complementary decline of French, made Scots the prestige dialect of most of eastern Scotland. By the sixteenth century Middle Scots had established orthographic and literary norms largely independent of those developing in England. From 1610 to the 1690s during the Plantation of Ulster some 200,000 Scots-speaking Lowlanders settled in