by Marc Morris
Throughout Lent, therefore, and for several weeks thereafter, the country was plunged into a state of high tension. Edward pressed on to Plymouth, where he remained for most of April, declaring to his officials that he would not leave until he had dispatched some help to Gascony. The earls, according to Walter of Guisborough, ‘went off to their own lands, where they would not allow the king’s servants to take either wool or hides, or anything whatsoever out of the ordinary’. Both sides, in other words, went to ground, waiting to see who would break first.104
During this time, the clergy crumpled. A month and more of hunger, humiliation and robbery had already taken its toll, and in February Edward had raised the stakes further, promising his churchmen that their outlawry and loss of land would be made permanent if they failed to settle by Easter. Accordingly, when the prelates, abbots and priors assembled in London at the end of March, they collectively petitioned their archbishop for a change of course. Winchelsea responded by allowing that each could follow his own conscience, at which point the stream of submissions to the king turned into a flood. Only the archbishop himself and a few diehard supporters continued to hold out, retiring to their dioceses and remaining quietly defiant.105
Even as the clergy collapsed, however, the magnates were reassembling and reaffirming their determination to resist. Around Eastertime, the four recalcitrant earls – Norfolk, Hereford, Arundel and Warwick – met in the woods near Montgomery and declared that they would not cross overseas with the king on account of the innumerable taxes that he had extorted from them. Economic hardship was, no doubt, their chief complaint, and would have played well with both the other men present, as well as the wider public. But it is also significant that the earls should have chosen to congregate in the March of Wales. To a greater or lesser degree, each of them was a Marcher lord and, in this capacity, had run up against Edward’s increasingly masterful behaviour in recent years. This was most obviously true of Hereford, who cannot have forgotten his humiliating treatment at the king’s hands in 1291. But Arundel, too, had latterly been forced to surrender part of his lordship of Clun, and charged with refusing to admit royal officials there. The same was true of Edmund Mortimer, son and successor of the famous Roger, who was also present at the Montgomery meeting. All these men shared the sense that the liberties won by their ancestors were being eroded for the benefit of an overbearing Crown. Now the government’s grip was weakening, they saw an opportunity to restore things to their proper order.106
In the second week of May, aware of his opponents’ machinations, Edward seized the initiative. Having said goodbye to whatever troops he had sent to Gascony, the king summoned a parliament to meet at Westminster in June. At the same time, orders went out for a muster in London the following month. No concessions were made: the controversial attempt to link service with landed wealth was resumed, and in even starker terms: now all men worth just £20 a year were enjoined to attend. Nor was there any indication of where they would be going, beyond the fact that it was ‘overseas’. As he issued these orders, however, Edward was heading east along the Channel coast, towards Canterbury, almost certainly for talks with Winchelsea. Whatever else happened, the king did not want his clerical and lay opponents making common cause. The archbishop was accordingly conciliated: on 12 June his confiscated houses were restored.107
One week later and Edward was back in Westminster. It was his first appearance there since the conquest of Scotland, and the king marked his arrival by ostentatiously presenting the regalia of the vanquished kingdom before the shrine of the Confessor. The audience for this act, however, was considerably smaller than it had been for the parallel performance that had followed the conquest of Wales. Those men with Edward in June were his remaining royalist supporters. It was not until 7 July, the day of the controversial muster, that the opposition arrived.108
Both camps were cagey and cautious, communicating by messengers and exchange of letters, but it did not take long to get to the point. Would Norfolk and Hereford, in their capacities as marshal and constable, draw up the muster lists for the coming campaign? No, the earls replied, they would not: the king’s summons had been both irregular and inadequate. Talks immediately broke down. Edward summarily deprived the two men of their hereditary posts and appointed others in their stead. He then made ready to arrest his opponents but, before he could do so, they once again withdrew from his court.109
Or at least some of them did. As opposition began to resemble out-and-out rebellion, resolve among the opposition began to crack. The earl of Warwick was probably the first to desert, allegedly bought off by the king, with whom he was in any case friends. John de Hastings, a Marcher lord who had attended the Montgomery meeting, soon went the same way. Arundel, too, was starting to waver, to judge from an undated letter he sent to Edward, pleading his case. The king, no doubt, was sending messages of his own to these men, making them individual offers, and working on their private fears.110
Edward’s bid for support culminated with a public performance on Sunday, 14 July, when he appeared on a stage outside Westminster Hall and addressed the assembled crowds. Admitting that he had made mistakes and acknowledging his subjects’ suffering, the king nevertheless asserted that he was acting for the good of the realm and the defence of his people. ‘I am castle for you, and wall, and house,’ Peter Langtoft has him say. It was powerful stuff, and well contrived: beside Edward on the stage stood a tearful Archbishop Winchelsea, to all appearances reconciled. The speech was also effectively an ultimatum, for the king, on the grounds that he might not return from France, went on to ask all those present to swear fealty to his son, the thirteen-year-old Edward of Caernarfon. The fact that Norfolk and Hereford could only do so two days later, and from a distance, left them looking isolated, their loyalty open to doubt.111
For two more weeks, the stand-off continued. The clergy, led by Winchelsea, tried to mediate. Edward’s agents, more provocatively, invited the earls to submit to the king’s grace. Norfolk and Hereford hit back with their own propaganda, denouncing the summons to serve overseas, the maltote, the heavy taxes, and the general arbitrary turn that royal government had recently taken.112 Edward himself clearly hoped for reconciliation. Towards the end of July he left London for St Albans, in a last-ditch attempt to meet with his opponents. But, when it came down to it, the king was not prepared to compromise, and was running out of time. His allies on the Continent, bought at immense cost, were waiting. On 28 July he gave up, and sent out new writs, merely inviting men to serve him in return for wages. Two days later, back in London, orders went out for yet another seizure of wool. With a candour born of his growing desperation, Edward explained he needed £50,000 to pay his allies, and that grabbing 8,000 woolsacks from his subjects was the only way to get it. Payment would be made later, he promised, from the proceeds of a new tax – an eighth – that parliament had approved the same day. This, of course, was a nonsense. Parliament by this time was just the rump of royalists whom the king still had with him – ‘the people stood about in his chamber,’ as one chronicler contemptuously put it.113
As soon as these orders had been issued, Edward left London, heading for the coast. His destination was the new town of Winchelsea, where the fleet to transport his army was waiting to sail. But as he rode south, the fragile consensus around him began to collapse, splintering under the weight of this last load of arbitrary measures. On 10 August, as the king reached Winchelsea, the town’s most famous son was holding an ecclesiastical council in London. The new tax was rejected as being incompatible with the pope’s proclamation, and the archbishop ordered the excommunication of anyone who laid hands on Church property. A few days later messengers from the lay opposition rode to meet Edward, but he refused to hear their petitions. Instead, the king elected to fight fire with fire. On 20 August he decreed that the Church was to be taxed ‘by royal authority’. The same day he prepared an answer for his opposition earls, ordering 170 armed knights to Rochester, a day’s ride from the ca
pital. The earls, however, struck first. On 22 August they burst into the exchequer at Westminster and forbade the seizure of wool and the collection of the eighth, saying they would not suffer to be tallaged like serfs.114
Two days later, and more than three years since the start of his war with France, Edward finally set sail for Flanders. He left behind him a country teetering on the brink. As the end of August approached, the regency government ordered more knights to muster at Rochester. In the March of Wales Hereford’s men went about saying openly that their lord was against the king’s peace. On Sunday, 1 September, Winchelsea began preaching the excommunication of royal officials from the pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral; as he did so, he was shouted down by royalist knights sent to stop him. The regents summoned a parliament to meet in London; the earls called a rival assembly to Northampton. Civil war seemed all but inevitable.115
Then news came out of the north. The English forces in Scotland had been defeated in open battle, with massive loss of life. The Devil had assumed a new guise, and his name was William Wallace.116
Uniting the Kingdom?
Few men living in the summer of 1297 were genuinely enthusiastic about the prospect of fighting in Flanders alongside Edward I, but John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, was a clear exception. All his life – and this year he would be sixty-six – the earl had been a staunch supporter of the Crown and the king’s close friend.1
On this occasion, however, Warenne’s anxiety to serve had less to do with his loyalism and more to do with avoiding the responsibility that had been foisted upon him the previous year. In 1296, true to form, he had marched with Edward against the Scots, and had led the English in their decisive victory at Dunbar. But the earl’s reward for this feat had been his appointment as Scotland’s new royal governor, and it was a role he clearly did not relish: within a few months he was actively offering the job to others. The king may have been well pleased to have rid himself of a turd, but his old friend was correspondingly dismayed to find himself charged with its custody. Warenne, in fact, behaved entirely as one might expect in such circumstances, and stayed as far away as possible, saying that the task was bad for his health. According to Walter of Guisborough, the earl found the Scottish weather so unbearably awful that he spent most of his time in the north of England.2
Inevitably, the absence of the governor had a deleterious effect on Scotland’s new English government, which by 1297 was already struggling to cope with a host of additional problems. Imposed on the country against the will of its people, the regime was in any circumstances likely to have proved unpopular and been perceived as oppressive. As it was, thanks to the stream of emergency demands emanating from England, the administration was from the first a genuinely extortionate affair. The Scots, like the other peoples of Edward I’s empire, were expected to supply the money and materials that would enable their overlord to prosecute his war against France. When, in May 1297, they were asked to supply the manpower as well, it proved to be the last straw: at that point unrest and resistance in Scotland boiled over into outright revolt. Trouble started in the west, at Lanark, where the English sheriff was killed.3
Behind this revolt, it seemed, lurked the usual suspects. One of the prime movers, for example, was Robert Wishart, the bulldog bishop of Glasgow, who six years earlier had stood up to Edward I at Norham. Also involved were several high-ranking members of the Scottish nobility, not all of whom had been captured or imprisoned during the English invasion the previous year. A surprising newcomer to their rebel ranks was the young earl of Carrick, Robert Bruce. Grandson of the late competitor for the throne, son of the disappointed collaborator of 1296, this third Robert might have been expected to toe the family line and aid the English, but instead he broke with ancestral tradition and threw his weight behind the patriotic cause. ‘I must join my own people,’ he reportedly told his father’s knightly tenants, ‘and the nation in which I was born.’4
Alas for the Scots, however, their aristocratic and ecclesiastical leaders once again proved stronger in their patriotism than they did in arms. Towards the end of June an English army crossed the Border from Cumbria, and within days the rebels were forced to surrender. On 7 July Wishart, Bruce and their allies submitted to terms at Irvine on Scotland’s western seaboard. To the young English commanders who had obtained this easy victory, it seemed that was the end of the matter. They rode east to the government’s base at Berwick, from where a letter was dispatched to the king a fortnight later. ‘Sire,’ it read, ‘your enemies are dispersed and dismayed.’5
The author of this now-anonymous announcement was evidently not the new regime’s treasurer, Hugh Cressingham. Unlike the military men fresh in from the field, or his boss, John de Warenne, who continued to linger in England, Cressingham worked in Berwick at the centre of the web. He could perceive the whole picture and, as he explained in his own letters to Edward, it was deeply alarming. ‘By far the greater part of your counties in Scotland still have no keepers,’ he said, ‘because of death, sieges or imprisonment.’ There were other rebels massing in the north, beyond the River Forth, and also in the south, in the Forest of Selkirk. Cressingham himself had wanted to march against them immediately – indeed, he had personally raised an army for this purpose – but had been out-voted. The consensus at Berwick was that they should wait for Warenne to arrive. ‘And so,’ the treasurer lamented as he drew to a close, ‘matters have gone to sleep.’6
While the English slumbered, the Scots were indeed being roused. Those in the north were led by Andrew Murray, the son and heir of a prominent local lord. Captured the previous year at Dunbar, he had escaped during the winter and raised rebellion in the spring. By August a number of northern towns and castles were already in his hands.7
Meanwhile, in the south, leadership had been assumed by a certain William Wallace. Unlike Murray, Wallace was a virtual nobody – nothing at all is heard of him before this juncture, bar a possible reference in a court roll of 1296 which mentions ‘William le Waleys, a thief’. When, the following year, he bursts unheralded into the picture, he is described by English chroniclers as ‘a bloody man’, ‘a chief of brigands’, ‘a vagrant and a fugitive’. Most likely he was a younger son of Alan Wallace, a minor landowner in Ayrshire; such origins would account for the fact that his earliest activities were concentrated in western Scotland. The death of the sheriff of Lanark in May 1297 had been his handiwork, and thereafter he appears to have based himself in Selkirk Forest with his growing band of followers. ‘The common folk of the land followed him as their leader and ruler,’ wrote Walter of Guisborough, ‘the retainers of great lords adhered to him.’ By August 1297 Wallace and his popular army had moved into northern Scotland, where they linked arms with Murray’s forces.8
By this point, finally, John de Warenne had arrived in Berwick and been convinced by a no doubt frantic Cressingham of the urgent need for military action. There was yet more delay while they waited for those Scots who had surrendered at Irvine to complete their submissions (a process that was deliberately drawn out by the likes of Wishart and Bruce). But at last, probably as the end of August approached, the English army and its reluctant captain set out to crush the Scottish rebels.9
To do so they had to enter northern Scotland, and that meant crossing the River Forth – a feat easier said than done. The Forth rises in the west, near Loch Lomond, and flows east to meet the sea, thus effectively cutting the country in half. Moreover, for much of its eastern length it forms a broad tidal estuary, or firth, which could not be crossed except by boat. In fact, in the thirteenth century the Forth was referred to as ‘the Scottish Sea’, and on contemporary maps, northern Scotland was designated as Scotia ultra Marina – Scotland beyond the Sea.10
Warenne therefore marched his army towards the first place that the Forth could be bridged, which at that time was the royal burgh at Stirling. As the principal gateway between northern and southern Scotland, Stirling had a unique strategic importance (indeed, on one thirteenth-century
map, the town’s bridge is shown as the only link between the two halves of the country). It was also a brilliantly defended gateway: half a mile from the bridge, on the river’s southern shore, stood Stirling Castle. Nothing survives of the original medieval fortress, but it was almost certainly built of stone, and (like its latter-day replacement) rendered all but impregnable from its situation atop a great outcrop of volcanic rock.
When the earl arrived at Stirling in early September he discovered that Wallace and Murray were waiting for him on the opposite side of the Forth. By all accounts the Scots were greatly outnumbered, and thus the English commanders naturally assumed that, as at Irvine, their enemies would wish to negotiate. On this occasion, however, the negotiators were turned away with a celebrated rebuke. ‘Go back and tell your people that we have not come for the benefit of peace,’ said Wallace, ‘but are ready to fight, to avenge ourselves, and to free our kingdom.’
According to Walter of Guisborough, who preserved these attributed words, this was invitation enough for the more hot-headed in the English camp. But wiser heads, the chronicler added, had surveyed the surrounding terrain and foreseen the danger. The bridge, their only way forward, was also their major obstacle, for it was only wide enough for men to cross in two-by-two formation. In addition, there was not much room to manoeuvre once they reached the other side. At Stirling the Forth meanders in large, lazy loops, and consequently the northern end of the bridge connects not to an open plain but to a narrow tongue of land. ‘There was no better place in the kingdom of Scotland,’ Guisborough was later told, ‘to put the English into the hands of the Scots – the many into the hands of the few.’
