A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain

by Marc Morris

  No single aspect of this furious preparation concerned Edward more than the work of fifty carpenters at King’s Lynn, upon whose skill and diligence his whole strategy hinged. The king’s plan in 1303 was simple. He intended to penetrate northern Scotland – that part of the country in which he had not set foot since 1296, and where Comyn power was strongest. This, of course, entailed crossing the Forth, which in turn explains the sudden burst of industry in Norfolk. Rather than waste time winning control of Stirling, Edward proposed to create a new crossing further down the river – a pontoon bridge, of the kind that had been used to conquer Wales two decades earlier. Great efforts were taken to ensure that the finished product would be both viable and defensible – the Welsh prototype, after all, had worked only on the second attempt, and memories were still fresh of the disastrous attempt to cross the Forth in 1297. Three separate bridges of differing size were built, each of them equipped with drawbridges and giant crossbows.

  The scale of the enterprise, needless to say, was enormous. Preparing the bridges took almost four months, and cost almost £1,000. It took a fleet of thirty ships to ferry the completed parts into theatre.118

  It is consequently disappointing to discover that this massive feat of medieval engineering was apparently never used. ‘By chance there was no need of it,’ said Peter Langtoft, and it looks as if he was right. Edward and his army mustered on the Border in late May and by 6 June had reached Linlithgow. As the king’s writs show, however, he subsequently moved to Stirling, which suggests that in the event he crossed the Forth by the conventional route. Stirling Castle was still in Scottish hands, but its garrison was too small to trouble the English host as it swept past their walls and marched unopposed into the north.119

  The reason for Edward’s unimpeded progress soon became apparent. Within days his officials at Carlisle were writing panicked letters, reporting the arrival in south-west Scotland of ‘a great multitude of armed men’. The Scots, knowing that ‘almost all of the cavalry and infantry were with the king’, were attacking the depleted garrisons of Dumfries and Galloway. Worse still, on 18 June they crossed the Border and began laying waste to northern England.120

  Thus the nature of the conflict was established. It would not be decided in open confrontation, as at Stirling Bridge or Falkirk, but by attrition. Victory would go to whichever side could mete out the most pain and suffering in the territory of the other, while simultaneously enduring the misery inflicted in their own. Edward in due course heard the news from Carlisle and dispatched a relief force under Aymer de Valence and Robert Bruce. But the king himself pressed on northwards with the bulk of his host, razing everything in his path. ‘Hamlets and towns, granges and barns/Both full and empty, he everywhere burns,’ wrote Peter Langtoft. ‘He advanced taking much plunder,’ added Walter of Guisborough, ‘burning and destroying almost everything.’121

  If Edward hit hard, it was because his chances in a war of endurance were weak. From Stirling he advanced quickly to Perth, but there he was forced to wait for over a month while his supplies were replenished. As in previous campaigns, provisioning was perilously hand to mouth. Even in June, ships and crews were having to be arrested in southern England in order to ferry the requisite grain to the Firth of Tay. When the king finally struck out along Scotland’s north-eastern coast in late July, he continued to be dependent on this naval lifeline. A successful rendezvous with more ships at Montrose delivered him the necessary artillery to reduce the castle at nearby Brechin in early August. But when he reached Aberdeen on 23 August, the ships full of coin he had expected to find were not there. By this point Edward had already lost half his infantry; he could not afford to lose more. After waiting five days with no sight of a sail, he wrote an exasperated letter to the exchequer. ‘If we cannot make these payments,’ he said, referring to the wages of his men, ‘they will go back to their own parts, as they are already doing from day to day.’122

  Meanwhile, in south-western Scotland the situation had been transformed by the arrival of the Irish, who landed in the middle of August and began capturing castles along the west coast. The creation of this new front, combined with the simultaneous appearance in the region of forces under Valence and Bruce, seems to have succeeded in drawing the Scots’ fire. Certainly the English garrisons in Dumfries and Galloway, which a few weeks earlier had been on the verge of disintegration, were given succour enough that they managed to hold out.123

  The king, too, scraped through by the skin of his teeth. On 28 August, the very day his desperate letter was sent, ships arrived in Aberdeen with the much-needed money, and the reimbursed royal host was able to push on into the heart of enemy territory. By the middle of September Edward had reached the shores of the Moray Firth, and the abbey of Kinloss, which marked the furthest point of his devastating progress. A week later he was laying siege to John Comyn’s castle at nearby Lochindorb. By early October the fortress had fallen.124

  Comyn himself, however, showed no signs of flagging. At this time the Scots’ sole Guardian was still active in central Scotland, reportedly raiding English positions with a force of a hundred horse and 1,000 foot. To him and his allies it seemed impossible that their opponent could last much longer. In late September Aymer de Valence had written of his hope that some Scottish leaders might be about to come in, but within a few days he was obliged to eat his words. The Scots in question had approached the English camp at Linlithgow, taken one look at the sorry state of its starving Irish garrison, and concluded that their enemies were on the point of collapse.125

  And yet, in spite of its apparent exhaustion, English power prevailed. When Edward returned from harrying Comyn’s north-eastern heartlands, his forces were too weak to carry through his intention of reducing Stirling Castle, but the king nevertheless made it clear that he was not about to retire any further south. In November he ensconced his army on the north bank of the Forth at Dunfermline Abbey, while his son, the prince of Wales, established a separate camp on the Tay at Perth. It became evident that, once again, Edward was preparing to winter in the midst of his enemies.126

  If the continued presence of their oppressor in a part of Scotland that had previously offered them safe refuge was an ominous development for the Scots, the location of his new winter quarters must have been more dispiriting still. Dunfermline was the burial place of Scotland’s kings and queens – Edward’s own sister, Margaret, was buried there, alongside her husband, Alexander III. Perth, meanwhile, stood adjacent to the abbey of Scone, long since robbed of its ancient Stone. The English occupation of these two symbolic sites, once the sacred centres of Scottish royal power, served to emphasise the same fundamental point. For more than seven years, Scotland had been a kingdom without a king. For all that time the Scots, and the Comyn faction in particu lar, had fought doggedly and hopefully in the name of John Balliol. It was now certain, however, that Balliol would not be coming back. On 20 May England and France had at last sealed their long-postponed peace, and the Scots had not been included. ‘For God’s sake, do not despair,’ the Scottish negotiators in Paris had written to their com patriots back home. ‘If ever you have done brave deeds, do braver ones now.’ That summer the Scots had done their utmost to heed this exhortation, but, as the winter began to set in, so too did despair, and with it the painful realisation that the cause for which they had been fighting was now irredeemably lost.127

  Comyn and his allies surrendered early in the new year, having spent several weeks negotiating the best possible deal for themselves and the Scottish people. The terms they eventually secured, if not quite the total amnesty that they had hoped for, were nevertheless remarkably generous. In return for their submission, Edward guaranteed that there would be no loss of life or limb, lands or liberty. Some of those who came in were obliged to accept a period of temporary exile, the duration determined by the perceived scale of their offence.128

  In truth, Edward could hardly have acted otherwise. What was presented to the Scots as magnanimity was in rea
lity a tacit acknowledgement of their persisting power. Once upon a time, he had regarded the Scots as little more than a joke; a people he might conquer in a single summer, and whose affairs he might reorder at his whim. But since then it had taken him seven long years and every last ounce of strength to persuade them to accept surrender for a second time. The king may not have cared to admit it, but these were men who had earned the right to his respect.

  Comyn knelt before Edward in February; some 130 other landowners similarly swore allegiance to the king in a specially convened parliament at St Andrews in March. Thereafter, all that remained was to deal with those few Scots who had refused to attend the meeting and who continued to bear arms against their rightful overlord.129

  The first target – in the most literal sense – was Stirling Castle. The small Scottish garrison there had long been a thorn in Edward’s side; now their continued obstinacy gave the king the opportunity to conclude his conquest with an appropriately majestic display of royal might. From every quarter of Scotland, English artillery was shipped, trundled and reassembled in order to batter the fortress into submission.130 As far away as Perth and St Andrews, lead was stripped from the roofs of churches to make the counterweights that would give the trebuchets their tremendous hurling power. Inevitably, given Stirling’s virtually impregnable situation, the task of reducing it took weeks, but the spectacle was awesome. This was one of the earliest recorded occasions that gunpowder – ‘Greek Fire’, as contemporaries called it – was used in Britain. To distinguish them, possibly even to jollify them, the throwing machines were given names, and proceedings outside the castle soon assumed the air of a chivalric entertainment. Edward thoughtfully had a large new window inserted into the queen’s chambers, so that she and her ladies could observe their gallant menfolk in action.

  Eventually, after twelve weeks of bombardment and pyrotechnics, the garrison indicated their willingness to surrender – a decision probably encouraged by the sight of a truly giant trebuchet, the work of more than fifty men for two whole months, approaching the point of completion. Unfortunately, Edward had by this time developed a personal interest in the Warwolf, as the beast had become known, and insisted that no surrender would be accepted until his new toy had been tested. Some modern historians have condemned him for this, though at the time nobody seemed to think his behaviour so very unreasonable: the defenders, after all, had been targeting the king throughout the siege and, indeed, had on two occasions come within a whisker of killing him. At length, on 24 July – presumably after the Warwolf had scored a few hits – a surrender was accepted. The garrison presented themselves, as ritual recommended, barefoot and with ashes on their heads, in the hope that Edward would show them mercy; the king, with equal respect for convention, allowed that their lives would be spared. Thus the siege, and the war, ended in such a way that chivalric expectations were satisfied. There was even a tournament to mark the conflict’s final conclusion.131

  Only one individual of consequence was wholly exempted from the general clemency, and Edward did not intend to waste any more time tracking him down: the Scots themselves could do that as proof of their newly professed loyalty, and in due course they did. William Wallace was captured by his own countrymen in August the following year, led to London in chains, and charged with the crime of treason. This was somewhat ironic, for Wallace was probably the only Scottish leader who had not sworn allegiance to the English king – a fact that the prisoner himself pointed out at his hearing in Westminster Hall. Needless to say, it availed him nothing. On 23 August 1305, while Edward amused himself in the forests of Essex, his sometime adversary was dragged from Westminster to Smithfield, hanged on a gallows, cut down while still alive, disembowelled and beheaded. His entrails were then burned, his body quartered, and the quarters dispatched for public display in Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth. His head was mounted on a spike above London Bridge. Thus were the Scots made aware of treason’s terrible reward, and the slaughter at Stirling Bridge was avenged.132

  A Lasting Vengeance

  For several months after the siege of Stirling, Edward I did little except recover his strength and savour his victory. Having left Scotland in the last week of August, he spent two months travelling slowly through the north of England, and a further seven weeks resting at the royal manor of Burstwick in Yorkshire – a stop that Peter Langtoft described as a ‘sojourn awhile for his health’. At length the court crossed the Humber in December and arrived in Lincoln, where Christmas was kept in exceptionally lavish style. As one annalist explained, the buyers of the royal household had been ordered to prepare a feast worthy of a man who was now ‘the king and lord of the monarchy of two realms’. Edward was also unusually lavish in his distribution of rewards, handing out valuable gifts as well as compliments to the earls and knights who had helped him obtain what the same writer referred to as ‘his triumphant peace’.1

  There was ample reason for feeling triumphant. With Scotland finally surrendered, Edward exercised a direct lordship in the British Isles far greater than that enjoyed by any of his ancestors. From the far north of Britain to the far west of Ireland, across the liberties of the March of Wales, the writ of the king of England now ran without challenge or contradiction. Nor was victory to be measured merely in insular terms. Gascony was also back in English hands as a result of the recently ratified peace with France. In June 1303, while Edward had been decisively harrying the Scots into submission, the duchy had been ceremoniously restored to his representatives in the church at St Emilion. At home and abroad, the king’s rights were at last respected and acknowledged.2

  Obtaining that acknowledgement, however, had come at an exceedingly heavy price. In order to recover Gascony, and especially to subjugate Scotland, Edward had placed an enormous, almost intolerable strain on the rest of his empire. The peoples of England, Wales and Ireland had been asked repeatedly, year in year out, to provide the men to fight in these wars, the food to feed them and the money to pay them. In financial terms alone the costs were staggering. During the decade between the seizure of Gascony in 1294 and the surrender of Scotland in 1304, Edward had spent a sum well in excess of a million pounds. To raise it he had resorted to terrible expedients – visiting violence on the clergy, seizing the goods of his subjects without their consent, and even trying to impose taxation against the will of parliament. In consequence he had faced censure from the pope, provoked rebellion in Wales and very nearly sparked a new civil war in England.3

  As this brief list of repercussions implies, the costs had been more than financial. The overall consequence of Edward’s wars was massive dislocation and disarray. In England, for example, the prolonged nonresidence of the king and his magnates had led directly to a dramatic rise in lawlessness, far worse than the temporary crime waves occasioned by their earlier absences in Wales and Gascony. The remarkable robbery of the Crown jewels from the treasury at Westminster Abbey in the spring of 1303 was but one manifestation of the increase; across the country as a whole its effects were far more serious and endemic. Crime, in a word, had become organised. Every town and county had witnessed the appearance of bands of armed men, popularly known as ‘trailbastons’ on account of the clubs they habitually dragged around with them. Through threat of violence these thugs held local society in their thrall. Langtoft explains how they would openly offer their services on market days, undertaking to beat people up in return for a fee. Other evidence shows how they indulged in racketeering, the intimidation of juries, robbery and murder. It was all highly embarrassing for a king who earlier in his reign had issued so much legislation with the aim of reducing crime, yet it was hardly unexpected, for Edward’s contribution to the problem amounted to more than just negligence. At the start of his war with France, such had been his desperate need, the king had handed out pardons to all who were willing to fight, emptying his prisons in the process. The problem he now faced was partly the result of these former jailbirds coming home to roost.4

  Bad as
things were in England, they were worse in Ireland, where the same combination of pressure and neglect had brought an already troubled lordship to a point of more or less perpetual crisis. Edward’s war effort had several times emptied Ireland of its English military tenants, leaving the colony’s less martial members at the mercy of their native Irish neighbours. At the same time, his willingness to pervert the course of justice in pursuit of his rights in Scotland had made it ridiculously easy to secure pardons for murder, which meant that homicides among the settler community had risen as a result. The extent of the problem had already been apparent in 1297, when a celebrated parliament had assembled in Ireland and drawn up a set of emergency measures ‘to establish the peace more firmly’. As these measures indicated, lawlessness was seen to be increasing in line with absenteeism of English landlords and the degeneracy of those who remained. Profits at the Dublin exchequer were diminishing, and the area of the country under English control was contracting.5

  In Gascony, meanwhile, the disarray was equally great, albeit for different reasons. Although the rule of law was now slowly returning to the duchy, for the past decade its inhabitants had known little besides disorder and destruction. French occupation had led to many Gascons being dislocated and disinherited; English military efforts to reverse the situation had merely added to the devastation. According to the terms of the recent peace, Gascony was to be returned to its status quo ante bellum. But naturally this was proving impossible in practice, partly because of the chaos the conflict had created, and partly because the duchy’s legal relationship with France was now more hopelessly confused than ever.6