A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Llywelyn ap Gruffydd

  As early as the 1180s, Henry II was being advised how to defeat the native Welsh by the Anglo-Norman-Welshman, Gerald of Wales, author of two great books on Welsh affairs. Gerald advised that in their mountain fastnesses, above all in Snowdonia, the Welsh were impregnable. As with the Vietnamese of the 1960s or the Afghans of the early twenty-first century, no amount of head-on confrontation would bring the Welsh to decisive engagement. Threatened by the shock and awe of an English expeditionary force, they would merely retreat to the hills, avoid pitched battle, emerging to raid and pillage once more when the threat had passed. What was needed, Gerald suggested, was a chain of castles and centres of Englishry running along the Welsh coastline, to contain Welsh access to their Irish sea-borne trade and to confine the rebellious Welsh to the uplands from which few resources for future rebellion could be obtained. The problem here was that the means for such an undertaking were lacking to Henry II’s successors. Both King John, after 1215, and Henry III, in the 1250s and 60s, had been forced to stand mutely by as the Welsh capitalized upon English political weakness to extend their authority, raiding the Welsh Marches and burning castles. The princes of Gwynedd – Llywelyn ap Iorweth (d.1240) and his grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd (d.1282) – without any settled capital ‘city’ but ruling from the enclave of Garth Celyn overlooking the Menai straights, between Bangor and Conway, had exploited English political turmoil to obtain recognition of their special status as rulers over the native Welsh, entitled to the homage of the other Welsh princes and to a degree of legal autonomy from England and its kings.

  It was this situation which Edward I now sought to reverse. In the summer of 1277, an English army, more than 15,000 strong, advanced from Chester along the north Welsh coast. Ships transported further troops to Anglesey to harvest the grain and hence deprive Llywelyn ap Gruffydd of the means with which to wage further war. The outcome was a negotiated settlement in which Llywelyn abandoned various gains he had made in the 1260s and was forced to promise a war indemnity of £50,000, a figure which in itself suggests a booming Welsh economy, based upon Irish sea-born trade. At this rate, Edward’s wars could be made almost to pay for themselves.

  Open hostilities with the Welsh erupted again in 1282, when Llywelyn’s disgruntled younger brother, Dafydd, believing himself to have been insufficiently rewarded for his part in Edward’s success of 1277, broke with the English and on Palm Sunday attacked Hawarden Castle in Flintshire (future residence of a very different sort of English statesman and a far more assiduous observer of the Sabbath, W.E. Gladstone). Once again, a concerted land and sea force, including levies from Edward’s dominions in Gascony, and the construction of a great pontoon bridge between Anglesey and the mainland, forced the Welsh into surrender. This time, however, Llywelyn himself was lured into an ambush at Irfon Bridge, near Builth Wells, and killed. Dafydd’s resistance continued for a further six months until he too was betrayed, handed over to the English and, at Shrewsbury in September 1283, hanged, disembowelled for his breach of the Sabbath at Hawarden and his body then cut into quarters to mark his treason. The heads of both Llywelyn and Dafydd were exhibited on spikes outside the Tower of London. Llywelyn and Dafydd’s children were imprisoned and, in the case of the daughters, forced into English nunneries where the last of them died half a century later.

  In less than a year, the last effectively independent Welsh princes had been removed from the scene. Only fifteen years separated the official ‘English’ recognition of Wales as an independent principality in 1267 and the brutal suppression of that independence in 1282. So feeble was the image of these Welsh princes conveyed to posterity that, in the 1890s, when it was proposed to raise a monument to Llywelyn at Irfon Bridge, so little money was subscribed in Wales that a neighbouring English squire, an Eton-educated disciple of Sigmund Freud, was obliged to step in to supply the funds.

  The extinction of Llywelyn’s family did not in itself bring an end to Welsh resistance. Despite (or rather, precisely because of) the building of that chain of castles which Gerald of Wales had proposed, stretching from Harlech to Conway and from Caernarvon to Beaumaris in Anglesey, despite the wholesale importation of English settlers to a series of new towns, at Flint, Rhuddlan and elsewhere, and despite the division of Wales itself, including Snowdonia, into a series of administrative units modelled on the English shires where major felonies were now to be tried according to English rather than native Welsh law, the Welsh themselves rose in rebellion in 1287 and even more seriously in 1294. This second uprising required the efforts of nearly 30,000 men and subsidies of more than £50,000 to suppress.

  Wales, the First English Colony

  Nevertheless, by 1295, Wales was effectively conquered. The Welsh princely regalia, Llywelyn’s treasures, were fashioned into plate off which the English king might dine. Edward I had achieved something which no predecessor on the throne of England could claim: the complete conquest of a neighbouring principality and the obliteration of its future independence. Not even Ireland, only partially conquered or settled after 1172, had suffered such a fate. Wales thus became the first and greatest of Edward I’s military conquests, and England’s first imperial colony. These imperial connotations were deliberately emphasized at Caernarvon, where the walls of Edward’s new castle were banded in layers of light and dark masonry, in imitation of the land walls of the Roman imperial city of Constantinople and in conscious reflection of the Welsh legend that the father of Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome and the founder of Constantinople, had been buried at Caernarvon, his tomb supposedly discovered there earlier in the thirteenth century.

  Further south, across the Bristol Channel, as early as 1278, Edward had presided over the reburial, at Glastonbury Abbey, of the supposed bodies of two other figures prominent in Welsh legend: King Arthur and his wife, Guinevere. The intention here was simple: to demonstrate to the Welsh, once and for all, that Arthur was dead and buried, not waiting to rise again as champion of an independent Wales. It was at Caernarvon, in April 1284, once again almost certainly a carefully stage-managed event, that Edward’s queen, Eleanor of Castile, gave birth to a son destined to be the future King of England, Edward II. If the intention here was that the new Edward emulate the imperial glories of Constantine, then these arrangements were entirely in vain, the absurdity of Edward I’s expectations presaged as early as 1294 when the unfinished fortress at Caernarvon was the only one of Edward I’s new castles to be captured in the Welsh rebellion. Meanwhile, Edward’s English empire was itself constructed on foundations that were very far from firm. Italian merchants had financed Edward’s Welsh wars and his Welsh castles were built not by an English architect but according to the instructions of Master James of St-George, from the Franco-Swiss-Italian frontier duchy of Savoy.

  The Scots

  By the mid-1290s, other shadows had begun to fall across Edward’s imperial horizons. If his ultimate goal was the consolidation of the British Isles under English imperial authority, then he needed to look not just westwards to Ireland and Wales but northwards to the kingdom of the Scots. Here, since the late eleventh century, a dynasty of kings, as much Anglo-Norman as Scoto-Gaelic, had been established in the lowland regions with their own network of earls and barons, in many cases themselves of Anglo-Norman descent, stretching out into the still essentially native-ruled highlands and islands. The last of this Scots royal line, King Alexander III, died after a fall from his horse in March 1286 while attempting a late-night crossing of the Firth of Forth, having ignored the advice of those with whom he had feasted in Edinburgh Castle, in order to visit his young new queen. As with many a highland motoring accident, neither lust nor strong drink was ever publicly alleged as a factor contributing to this tragedy. Alexander’s son, born to a first marriage to a daughter of King Henry III of England, had died only two years before, in his early twenties. No doubt, Alexander’s anxiety to visit his new wife had something to do with his desire to replenish the royal quiver
.

  His untimely death ensured that his only surviving heir was a granddaughter, Margaret, known as the ‘Maid of Norway’, herself born in 1283 to a marriage between Alexander’s daughter and King Eric II of Norway. After 1286, Margaret was in theory Queen of Scotland. In practice, the Scots themselves chose a committee of guardians, who eventually, after negotiations between Scots, English and Norwegian ambassadors, agreed that Margaret should be dispatched from Norway to Scotland, leaving open the possibility that she might in due course marry Edward, the eldest son of King Edward I of England and thereby bring about a union in which the future Edward II would become de facto ruler of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. In the event, Margaret died in October 1290, in the Orkney Islands (not sold by Norway to the Scots crown until the 1470s), without ever having set foot on the Scottish mainland. Edward I’s plans for an easy imperial succession were brought to nothing. The Scots themselves were left with neither king nor queen. The union of the Scots and English thrones was postponed by three hundred years.

  It was into this situation that Edward I now stepped, claiming to act as arbiter in the ‘Great Cause’, to nominate a successor to the Scots crown. Two candidates emerged, both of them members of Normanno-Scots families with landed interests both in Scotland and in England: Robert de Bruce, lord of Annandale in the central lowlands, and John de Balliol, lord of Galloway. The Bruces were of Norman descent, from Brix near Cherbourg. Robert himself held extensive lands in Essex and had fought in Edward’s army during the English conquest of Wales. The Balliols were ultimately from Picardy, from Bailleul, near Abbeville. Established in northern England under the early Norman kings, like other northern French families, they had risen to greater prominence during the rule of King Stephen, himself Count of Boulogne. One of John de Balliol’s ancestors had been captured alongside King Stephen at the Battle of Lincoln in 1141. Another had fought for Henry II, playing a leading role in the campaign which culminated, in 1174, with the capture of the Scots King, William I, near Alnwick.

  Neither the Balliols nor the Bruces, therefore, were exactly unfamiliar to the English court. From the Great Cause, in 1292, Edward chose the claims of John de Balliol over those of Robert de Bruce of Annandale. It was a fateful choice. Balliol, favoured precisely because of his pliancy (he had already named his eldest son and heir Edward, which supplies a rather heavy-handed clue as to his loyalties), proved incapable of bringing order to Scotland. Bruce’s son, the rather more famous Robert Bruce, rebelled, almost certainly with his father’s sanction. A council of a dozen Scots barons now claimed to have wrested authority from Balliol. Early in 1296, this council negotiated a treaty with the King of France, the origins of the so-called ‘Auld Alliance’, by which the Scots and the French sought mutual support against their common enemy, the King of England.

  Techniques which Edward had employed against the Welsh, by using English law and his status as overlord to undermine Welsh independence, had been applied with equal success by the French to Edward’s own subjects in Gascony who were encouraged by the French King, Philip IV, to present their cases for arbitration not before Parliament in England but before the French Parlement in Paris. War with France broke out in 1294. Edward’s response was rapid and apparently overwhelming. In a campaign lasting barely twenty-one weeks, he brought the Scots to heel, seizing the border fortress of Berwick and defeating the Scots army at Dunbar. Having suppressed the Welsh rebellion of 1294, he negotiated a series of alliances in Germany and the Low Countries to launch a two-pronged attack on the French timed for 1297. Here, however, his luck ran out.

  The costs of war in Wales, Scotland and France were too high for royal finance to bear. Additional charges of 40s per sack of wool exported from England merely brought outcry against this ‘maltote’ or ‘bad tax’, not least from English landowners and wool growers who feared that the price that they received for their produce would be lowered so that wool merchants could recoup the tax. Edward’s allies in the Rhineland, like the earlier allies recruited by King John of England for his campaign of 1214, demanded extortionate subsidies, in excess of £250,000. Meanwhile, the clergy of England, spurred on by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and backed by papal letters intended to starve both the English and the French war machines of finance, resisted attempts to impose subsidies on the Church. The Riccardi bankers upon whom Edward had relied for credit were bankrupted, probably already overstretched by the costs of the Welsh campaign and owed nearly £400,000 by the crown, in theory repayable from future proceeds of the customs, in practice just as useless a security as the junk bonds of modern Wall Street.

  This was in effect the first and in some ways still the most serious sovereign debt crisis in the history of England. Into this perfect storm of financial catastrophe, strode two further heralds of apocalypse. The earls of Gloucester and Hereford, long resentful of the King’s extension of authority over the Welsh Marches, refused to serve in France unless with the King in person. In other words, they would sail with the King to Flanders but they would not take up independent command of the King’s army in Gascony. By the time that this crisis was resolved and Edward was ready to sail for Flanders, his allies had already been defeated by the French. The only real hostilities left for Edward to witness took place amongst his own sailors, between the men of the Cinque Ports of Kent and Sussex and the fishermen of Yarmouth. Worse still, the King left England at the precise moment that events in Scotland reached climax.

  William Wallace

  In May 1297, a freeholder from Ayrshire, William Wallace, apparently already outlawed as a robber and brigand, murdered the newly imposed English sheriff of Lanark. Perhaps with the tacit approval of the bishop of Glasgow, perhaps as an independent agent claiming to act on behalf of King John de Balliol, Wallace now launched himself on a campaign of terror. He attempted the assassination of the English justiciar, William Ormsby. At Stirling Bridge, in September 1297, he lured an incompetently led English cavalry into slaughter by his own Scots spearmen. The army’s commander was so determined to observe the chivalric conventions that he effectively required the battle to be started twice, recalling more than 5,000 troops who had already crossed over to the Scots side of the bridge, in order that he might publicly confer knighthood on various of those about to fight. Edward I’s treasurer of Scotland, Hugh of Cressingham, was killed in the ensuing bloodbath. His body was flayed and his skin reputedly used to make a sword belt for Wallace’s waist.

  A great deal of myth-making obscures our image of the true William Wallace. Much of what is recorded of him depends upon the testimony of a fifteenth-century Scots bard, ‘Blind Harry’, whose writings are as wildly romantic as his name and who seems to have made up most of what he wrote. Blind Harry’s lead here has been followed by any number of later bards, romantics and Hollywood film producers. What is clear is that Wallace’s rebellion could not have come at a worse time for Edward and the English. Stirling Bridge was followed by a wholescale invasion of Scotland by Edward I, for the first time making use of Welsh archers and infantry as a major contingent in his army, culminating in the defeat of Wallace’s spearmen at Falkirk in July 1298. In English eyes, one set of defeated barbarians was to be used to bring order to another.

  Wallace melted away in the confusion and was not captured for a further seven years. Tried in Westminster Hall, he was eventually hung, disembowelled and quartered, like Dafydd of Wales before him, and his head displayed on London Bridge.

  Robert Bruce

  Meanwhile, the Scots, emboldened by Wallace’s victory at Stirling, and not subsequently cowed even by expeditions which Edward I launched against them in 1300, 1301 and 1303, found both a cause and a leader, the younger Robert Bruce. Robert Bruce had toyed with rebellion at least twice before, on each occasion making his peace with King Edward. In February 1306, however, during a meeting with John Comyn, another major player on the Scots political scene, at the church of the Greyfriars in Dumfries, Bruce murdered Comyn before the high altar. A month later, on t
he feast of the Annunciation, 25 March, at Scone near Perth, Bruce was crowned as King Robert I of Scotland by the patriot bishop Robert Wishart of Glasgow.

  Scots Independence and Welsh Subjection

  The Stone of Scone, an oblong block of red sandstone on which Scottish kings were traditionally inaugurated, had been removed to Westminster Abbey in 1296, after the opening campaign of the Anglo-Scots war, and incorporated into a wooden chair used at the coronation of subsequent kings of England. It was not officially restored to Scotland until 1996, 700 years after its removal, and even now is due to be returned to Westminster whenever required for a British coronation.

  Meanwhile, and although few at the time might have guessed it, the coronation of Robert I of Scotland, the first ever conducted without the Stone, ensured a renewal of Scots independence and a further three hundred years of Scots kingship. Far from the English absorbing the Scots, in 1603 the Scots King, James VI, was crowned in England as King James I. Where the Welsh princes had fallen before the might of Edward’s armies, fading into an impotent nostalgia for a vanished Welsh past, Scotland recovered both its independence and its own line of kings.

  The reasons for this disparity in the fates of Scotland and Wales were both geographic and economic. Scotland was not only wealthier than native Wales but a far more extensive landmass. The network of castles which Edward constructed around the Welsh coast, to contain the princes of Snowdonia, was unfeasible in the case of Scotland. Even though in 1296 Edward had pursued his enemies as far north as Aberdeen, and in 1303 English troops were garrisoned in Inverness, there were always points further north or west to which the Scots could retire, from where they could sally forth once the threat had passed. Scotland was ideal bandit territory, and Wallace’s victory at Stirling Bridge was a classic example of the way in which a poorly equipped, pastoral people could nonetheless inflict total defeat upon an army accustomed to more chivalric usages.