by Ed West
They were possibly small in number, but as their language came to dominate one can assume that they did too; they built fortresses and conducted warfare with great ferocity, as the evidence from such sites as Fin Cop in Derbyshire shows.9 The different groups may have shared regions, as we know later peoples did, villages of indigenous people on one side of the river and newcomers on the other. They could have co-existed for many years, perhaps even centuries, but at some point, the indigenous people were absorbed by the Celtic speakers and their culture vanished.
By the time of the Romans’ arrival, there were two major and related Celtic linguistic groups on the archipelago, the Brythonic and Goidelic, the former’s language being the ancestor of Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, and the latter of Irish, Scots, and Manx Gaelic. There was also Pictish, spoken in what is now central and northern Scotland, which remains a mystery; it was perhaps a mixture of Celtic and a pre-Indo-European language now extinct.10 The Picts wore paint and for this reason the Irish called them “the people of the designs,” or Cruithni.
Most of what we know of pre-history is through bones and stones, but at the time the Houses of Lancaster and York were fighting over the realm, people had a very different idea of the past, and this is reflected in the chronology of Westeros. In The History of the Kings of Britain, written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1138 during a previous war between two houses, it is explained that the first inhabitants of the island were giants; they were followed by Trojans who fled that city after its destruction, led by Aeneas’s descendent Brutus, who sailed all the way from the eastern Mediterranean to Britain, landing on the southern coast and dividing the island between his three sons. His eldest son Locrinus ended up ruling the whole island, followed by ninety-eight successors, until the arrival of the Romans. Geoffrey was, to put it kindly, rather liberal with the truth.
And so in Martin’s world, the chronology may be mythical, too; people talk of family rivalries going back thousands of years, yet in real life it was commonly believed in Tudor England that the Romans had built the Tower of London 1,500 years before; in fact, the Normans had, only four centuries previously.11 So when members of the Stark family claim they have been in conflict with the Boltons for thousands of years, it is possible that they mean hundreds.
Likewise, the Wall of Ice is believed to be eight thousand years old, but it probably isn’t. Samwell Tarly finds there have only been 674 commanders of the Night’s Watch, not 997 as is commonly believed, suggesting the chronology is all mixed up. He says that, “The First Men only left us runes on rocks, so everything we think we know about the Age of Heroes and the Dawn Age and the Long Night comes from accounts set down by septons thousands of years later. There are archmaesters at the Citadel who question it. Those old histories are full of kings who reigned for hundreds of years, and knights riding around a thousand years before they were knights.”12 History in Westeros is full of anachronisms, just as real folk memory is.
Educated Westerosi believe their ancestors to be credulous, just as some Renaissance humanists did in late medieval Europe. So while educated people in the Middle Ages would not have known about the Beaker People, they understood that stories told of Brutus and one-eyed giants were most likely untrue. Some of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s contemporaries, highly-educated men with access to a wide range of sources, believed him to be an outright liar. William of Newburgh, a twelfth century monk from Yorkshire, said that “only a person ignorant of ancient history would have any doubt about how shamelessly and impudently he lies in almost everything.” And yet Geoffrey’s work was by the far the most read account of the time, and informed people’s views of the past; there are two hundred surviving manuscripts of his Latin-edition History of the Kings of Britain, more than all English and French texts of the period combined, an indication of how popular it was.
And it is only with the Greeks and Romans that Britain emerges from pre-history. The Brythonic peoples referred to their country as Alban, or Albion, a Celtic word meaning white, but to the civilized Phoenicians and Greeks, the most technologically advanced people of the time, they were the Cassiterides, or Tin Islands, a strange and foggy land located on the very edge of the known world (although “the Cassiterides” may not have referred to Britain but somewhere in France or Spain, no one entirely knows). Although the fifth century BC historian Herodotus referred to them, the first civilized man to actually visit was Pytheas, a Greek sailor from what is now Marseilles. In 330BC Pytheas travelled all the way to the coast of northern Scotland, a fantastically risky voyage in which he saw whales in the ferocious “dead sea” (as the shivering North Sea was called by Mediterranean people) and a land where the sun shone just a few hours a day. Pytheas had come into contact with some of the natives, virtual savages in comparison to the Greeks, and it was their fondness for tattoos that inspired him to give it a new name, Pretani, Pretannike or Brettaniai—Britain.
5
“YOU’RE NO SON OF MINE”
Why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones?
—VARYS
In Scotland a child sat on a throne, and not just a child but a seven-year-old girl, Margaret, “Maid of Norway.” Raised in her mother’s bitterly cold homeland in the far north, in 1290 the young queen finally made the perilous journey from Scandinavia to Scotland to claim the throne, as the last surviving grandchild of Alexander III. Margaret’s mother, another Margaret, had died in childbirth while both her uncles had perished young, and then her grandfather had broken his neck four years earlier riding home to spend his first night with a young French wife.
Life at sea was grim and terrifying. On board no one washed or shaved, everything was damp, and the cabin stank of urine, excrement, vomit, and rat.1 According to historian Laurence Bergreen, “Even a peaceful voyage was remarkably distasteful, uncomfortable, and dangerous. The dank, crowded ships stank of rotting food and human waste. Vermin ran riot, and passengers . . . had to coexist with cockroaches, lice, and rats.”2 It was unbearably hot in summer and cold in winter, and always cramped. If you were very rich you might have a panelled cabin with a hammock; if you were poor the journey was not going to be fun. There was always water in the hold, and the onboard urinals, made of terracotta, often overturned, although many chose to relieve themselves overboard, and it was not uncommon for men to fall into the sea during the night. Since few could swim at the time, most were never seen again.
Sailing after sundown was especially dangerous as lighthouses were extremely rare, there being only one in fourteenth century England, at St Catherine’s Oratory on the Isle of Wight, built in 1313; in fact, people in coastal areas were more likely to put out false signals in order to purposely wreck a boat and steal all its cargo rather than help. But as the average speed of a land journey was eight to ten miles a day, and brigands were more of a problem than pirates, sea travel was more practical, even within Britain. Travellers from Cambridge to York, a 150-mile land journey between two inland cities, were known to travel by boat up and down rivers and via the North Sea, hugging the coast.
Seafaring was most of all dangerous; as a matter of course, voyagers would make an offering to a saint before setting off, most commonly St Christopher, patron of travellers, and many wore pendants of the saint. Men would normally make wills before going on a boat, even for relatively short journeys, as no one could tell what the sea gods had in store. Sailors were especially superstitious and might throw someone overboard if convinced they were unlucky.
Alas fate was cruel to the young Maid of Norway and near the Orkney Islands, then still ruled by Norway, she fell ill from seasickness, and died, even before she had set foot in her new kingdom. This brought to an end a house that had ruled Scotland for two and a half centuries, and threw the crown into chaos, with thirteen different claimants.
Edward had planned for Margaret to marry his youngest son, another Edward, and thereby unite the crowns. After a two-year inquiry in which the King of England assumed leader
ship, Edward helped impose one claimant, John Balliol, Lord of Barnard Castle in Durham, an important point which blocked any Scottish invasion from Cumberland to Yorkshire. The Balliols were more English than Scottish, which was indeed the whole point of choosing him. His rival was Robert the Bruce, fifth Lord of Annandale, who had once fought with Edward against de Montfort; when he died in 1295, the cause was taken up by his son of the same name. Like many aristocrats even north of the border, the Bruces were once Normans, originally from Brix, south of Cherbourg, the name being de Brus at the time. However, unlike in England where the Normans came as conquerors, successive kings of Scotland had invited them to settle as a new aristocratic military caste.
Bruce’s young son and namesake, the seventh Lord of Annandale, was still an adolescent but already considered one of the best tourney knights in Britain. He would have grown up trilingual, speaking the Norman French of the aristocracy and the Scots dialect of English spoken in the south of Scotland, as well as the Gaelic of the north. Unfortunately, the newly-installed council under Balliol was dominated by the Bruce’s hereditary enemies, the Comyn family, a clan from the central Highlands—originally from Bosc-Bénard-Commin in Normandy—and in 1295 they used their power to seize all the Bruce castles.
Yet trouble was brewing for King Edward at the other end of his realm. His inept grandfather John had lost most of his continental possessions to Philippe Auguste, but the two kingdoms had enjoyed good relations since, largely because the wives of England’s Henry III and France’s Louis IX, Eleanor and Margaret of Provence, were sisters. However, those decades of peace were shattered in 1295 when the Iron King attacked Gascony, and when Edward demanded the Scots help him fight his war they instead rose up, storming Carlisle Castle. The young Bruce, despite his father’s warnings, joined the rebellion.
Edward, with loans from the Riccardi and Frescobaldi families of Florence, invaded Scotland with five thousand heavy cavalry and ten thousand footsoldiers. First the English stormed Berwick, where Edward had several hundred of the city’s people massacred, with countless bodies hung by the city’s walls as an example to any other would-be rebels. The king paid the townsfolk a penny a day to bury the numerous victims.
After defeating Balliol at Dunbar, Edward forced him to undergo a ceremonial “degradation” at Montrose with the Lion of Scotland torn from his surcoat, after which Scotland was ruled by a series of guardians. The king took with him back to London the Stone of Scone, or Stone of Destiny, a rock which was supposed to have been brought from Ireland by the first Scots king, and on which Scottish monarchs were crowned. It remained in London, inside a wooden coronation chair, for the next seven centuries.
The Scots were not only weaker than the English, but were also far more clannish and divided, and yet from time to time a charismatic leader will emerge in such a society, a sort of Mance Rayder figure; the Gauls had Vercingetorix to lead them against the Romans, and from 1297, the Scots had William Wallace. From the south-west of the country, Wallace’s family had originally been Britons—Wallace is related to “Welsh”—but little else is known about his origins except that he had been involved in criminal activity of various sorts. And yet he was to launch a guerrilla war that took a huge toll on the southern invaders, and at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in late 1297 inflicted a crushing defeat on the English.
Wallace probably devised the “schiltrom” which involved a tight circle of soldiers crammed with 1,500 spearmen—the front rank knelt down with twelve-foot spears held at a forty-five-degree angle, and those behind pointed theirs forward at chest height. At Stirling Bridge, the English were also caught with the river Forth at their backs, hemmed in and isolated in small pockets where they were surrounded by a hundred Scottish spearman. The Earl of Surrey, watching the massacre, panicked and retreated; another English commander, the hated Hugh de Cressingham, was killed and Wallace afterwards had him flayed—as he had supposedly done to Scottish prisoners—and turned his skin into a belt.
The English had ravaged crops across the south of Scotland and so with starvation overcoming them in 1298, Wallace led his men across the border to raid Northumberland. However, Philippe the Fair had now been bought off and deserted his allies, and the Scots were soon defeated at Falkirk; Wallace abdicated his leadership role and disappeared into the countryside.
As Edward’s war progressed the young Bruce had been drawn to the rebels, despite his father’s disapproval; then, in 1299, his feud with John Comyn accelerated with Comyn seizing him by the throat in an argument. But when Edward invaded again in 1301, his sixth excursion north, Bruce submitted, and by the time Edward launched his largest invasion yet, in 1303, all the leading Scots had bent the knee—with the exception of William Wallace.
Edward needed to capture Stirling, the largest town in the center of Scotland, giving whoever held it control over the whole country. In 1304, he laid siege to Stirling castle where he unveiled “Warwolf,” one of his trebuchets, terrifying war machines which also appear in Westeros, where they have names such as the Six Sisters. (In real life they also had colorful titles, and during the Third Crusade Richard the Lionheart had two trebuchets which he named “God’s Own Catapult” and “Bad Neighbor.”) Siege machines in the tenth and eleventh century were basically giant catapults, but by the start of the thirteenth they had been replaced by the trebuchet, first in northern Italy and then elsewhere in western Europe. Trebuchets had a range of up to three thousand feet (three hundred metres) and could fire weights up to 750 lbs (sixty kilograms). First used in China, they were brought to western Europe via Byzantine Greece, and are mentioned by the Strategikon military manual of Emperor Maurice in AD539.
This period also saw the development of battering rams, cats and other machines designed to storm castles, as well as mobile sheds called tortoises which would give attackers some measure of protection from arrows. (Battering rams often had the head of a ram painted on them.) Besiegers would also use a tall wooden tower to overlook and attack a castle, requiring some very brave men to jump across and hope that they made it and that their comrades did not leave them. Siege or “counter-castles” were also built next to castles; Henry I besieged Arundel in the south of England in 1102 with such a temporary building.
At one point, a crossbow bolt went through Edward’s clothes while he was riding around the walls, and stones from a trebuchet scared his horse which threw him. And yet, even when the Scots submitted, he refused to accept their surrender for four days, so he could continue battering its walls with his machines, all the while threatening its defenders with disembowelment. As the war went on, Edward’s ruthlessness and cruelty toward the Scots intensified, to the point of mania. The king even had his own version of Gregor Glegane, a man-mountain called Sir John Fitz Marmaduke, and up in Scotland commanded him: “You are a bloodthirsty man, I have often had to rebuke you for being too cruel. But now be off, use all your cruelty, and instead of rebuking you I shall praise you.”3
Wallace was captured the following year, betrayed by Sir John Menteith, a fellow Scotsman, who apparently blamed him for the death of his brother (and considering Wallace’s record, that is not implausible). According to legend, Menteith revealed his enemy’s location to English soldiers by turning a loaf of bread upside down in a tavern where Wallace was staying.
Wallace’s execution was even more gruesome than Dafydd’s. Dragged through the streets of London, he was half-strangled in a noose before being castrated and disembowelled, his guts and genitalia burned in front of him. Finally, his suffering was ended with the axeman’s swing and his body hacked to pieces, his bloody remains sent north to the border towns of Newcastle and Berwick, as well as Stirling and Perth in Scotland. Only his head remained in London, mounted on the bridge as an expression of the king’s power.
The elder Robert the Bruce had died in 1304, but Edward deeply distrusted his son; and while a truce was agreed between John Comyn and young Bruce, Edward had already ordered his arrest. However, Edward’s son-in-law R
alph de Monthermer, a friend and admirer of Bruce’s, warned him with a poetically coded message, a silver shilling bearing Edward’s image, as well as some spurs; this he correctly interpreted as a warning and with his family and retainers headed further north. Along the way Robert’s party came across a Scotsman riding in the other direction and searched him to find a letter from Comyn promising Edward his support. Bruce now sent a message to John Comyn asking for a meeting in Dumfries, and the two men cast eyes at each other at the altar of Greyfriars Church, where Bruce stabbed him. Bruce fled, but hearing that Comyn was still just about alive, two of his followers went in and finished the job. The rebel lord now declared himself king.
King Edward responded with characteristic brutality. As revenge, Robert’s sister Mary Bruce and another woman Isabella, the Countess of Buchan, who had offended Edward by helping to crown Robert, were taken prisoner. Against all the rules of warfare, they were stuck in wooden and iron cages and then attached to the walls of Berwick and Roxburgh castles as a public warning. For four years they endured the indignity of Edward’s imprisonment, something unknown in the French-speaking world of which they were all part, where aristocrats were by custom treated quite well, even lavishly, in captivity. Mary Bruce’s appointed servants in jail, all of them elderly, were ordered never to smile at her.
Edward had also wanted Bruce’s adolescent daughter Marjorie caged at the Tower of London but changed his mind, and she was instead put into the custody of the Percy family, much to her relief. Robert’s wife Elizabeth Bruce escaped punishment because she was the daughter of the Earl of Ulster, an English aristocrat, but she was kept under house arrest for eight years.
And now dozens of men were rounded up and executed; Simon Fraser, a knight who fought with Wallace and then Bruce, got the full traitor’s death—hanged, drawn, and quartered—an innovation introduced by Edward. Also killed were Bruce’s friend Christopher Seton and two of Bruce’s brothers, Neil and Alexander, the latter a highly-respected scholar. John of Strathbogie, Earl of Athol, was hanged and burned, and his head displayed on London Bridge, the first earl to be executed in England for over two centuries, heralding a new era of savagery.
