The limits that a large and aggressive neighbor imposed on the Flemings’ independence did nothing to restrain Flemish prosperity. By the end of the thirteenth century, Flanders was, with northern Italy, the wealthiest sector of Europe, with a per capita GDP at least 20 percent greater than France’s, and 25 percent more than England’s. It was also Europe’s most urbanized region, with as much as 40 percent of its population living in towns, especially Bruges and Ypres. That this success story occurred in a county that was characterized by poor soil, a very high water table (the name “Flanders” is from the old Dutch word for “flooded”), and a set of extremely aggressive neighbors with violent tempers seems a mystery. One part of the solution is found in the Flemish climate.
The persistent Azores High, the high-pressure zone that was the likely cause of the warm and dry four centuries of the MWP in Europe, is a huge elliptical anticyclone—that is, an egg-shaped body of air with a clockwise rotation.* In such a formation, the areas of maximum curvature are at the two narrow ends of the ellipse, which is also where the pressure is highest. When the North Atlantic Oscillation carries warmer air from the Atlantic to Europe, as it did so frequently during the MWP, the eastern pressure ridge of the Azores High lies directly over Flanders. The resulting warming and drying of the various estuaries of the Scheldt River created the kinds of potential locations for the small towns that became characteristic of the county. Where towns and farms couldn’t be built—on salt marshes, for example—the industrious Flemings built dikes around the reclaimed land, creating the pastures known as polders.* While the rest of Europe coped with population growth by converting forests into farmland, the Flemings turned swamps into towns and sheep pastures. The Flemish cloth industry was a direct, and very profitable, consequence.
Another consequence of the climate-driven growth of towns and textiles was that Flanders became the first place in northern Europe where commoners regularly became richer than the nobility; weaving cloth, it turns out, is far more productive than growing wheat. This made the relationship with England—the largest wool producer in Europe—more and more important, and therefore more and more troubling to the county’s nominal suzerain, the king of France.
Edward I had been building alliances with Flanders since the 1270s, though, as the Scots could have told the Flemish, England’s king wasn’t the most constant of friends. In 1297, he made a separate peace with Philip IV, and gave his tacit approval to the French king’s decision to not only annex the county, but to imprison Guy de Dampierre, count of Flanders, and his son, the future Robert III.
In the spring of 1302, Philip IV of France sent a force into Flanders in pursuit of rebels who had been agitating for independence. French troops could occupy the county without—as, again, the Scots could have warned—pacifying it. They didn’t catch the rebels, but they did evict thousands of citizens of the prosperous Flemish city of Bruges from their homes. On May 18, the city’s burghers returned, and massacred not only the French garrison, probably three hundred in all, but also every Fleming accused of collaborating with the enemy. The so-called Bruges Matin (in France) or Brugse Metten (in Flanders) was followed by a general call for troops throughout the county.
The weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and shepherds of the Flemish countryside answered the call. So did the merchants and artisans of the towns. Guy of Namur and Willem van Gulik—both members of Dampierre’s family—were named to command, and they led their troops to a small victory at Oudenarde before arriving at the fortress town of Courtrai on the Lys River northeast of the textile city of Lille on June 26, and settling in for a siege. On July 8, a French relief force arrived.
Even more than Stirling Bridge, the Battle of Courtrai occupies the cliché space reserved for history’s great turning points, this one in the history of warfare. The opposing sides were almost perfectly asymmetric: the Flemings—perhaps seven thousand of them—were almost all infantry, most of them armored in mail, and carrying either a long spear, known as a geldon, or a goedendag, essentially a baseball bat with a spear point.* Just as important were their shovels; the Flemings dug hundreds of ditches in anticipation of the arrival of French heavy cavalry, along a narrow canal connecting them to the Lys.
The French didn’t disappoint. Robert of Artois led a traditional feudal force including around three thousand heavy cavalry, primarily knights with their squires and men-at-arms; a thousand crossbowmen, and four thousand infantry.
On the morning of July 11, van Gulik flooded the ditches and positioned his troops behind them in solid line, eight files deep, with their backs to the river. Count Robert attempted to break the line, first with his crossbowmen, but their slow rate of fire, perhaps two quarrels every minute, evidently made him impatient enough to send his infantry into the attack. Had he better tactical sense, he might have let them continue to bloody the Flemings, but, like most commanders of the era, Robert’s entire professional training had been as a mounted knight, and he wasn’t about to reward foot soldiers with the glory properly owed to the cavalry. In three lines, the French cavalry charged, and foundered in van Gulik’s ditches. As the first line was stopped by a combination of Flemish geldons and muddy ground, the second ran into them, followed by the third. Three thousand knights and squires were stopped dead in a constricted space from which they could neither advance nor retreat; and a cavalryman who can’t maneuver is a very easy target indeed. When the Flemings finally advanced, in line, they turned the field into a slaughterhouse.
Some of the French were able to break off combat and attempted to retreat; others tried to surrender and discovered that the same class consciousness that prompted Count Robert to give the honor of the victory to his noblest troops worked just as well in reverse. Though the code of chivalry, sanctified through the centuries, allowed knights to surrender to other knights in the expectation that they would be ransomed, the code didn’t consider an army of commoners. The Flemings wanted a victory, not a payday, and took no prisoners. More than half the French cavalry were killed outright, and at least seven hundred sets of spurs taken as trophies. Those trophies were subsequently displayed in the Cathedral of the Virgin in Courtrai, from which the battle takes its even better-known name: the Battle of the Golden Spurs.*
The lessons of Courtrai were profound. The battle dramatically changed the calculus of chivalric warfare. Since it cost ten times more to put a knight in the field than to arm and train a spearman, the total destruction of seven thousand heavy cavalry by three thousand infantry made a powerful case for what a modern strategist would call a reallocation of forces. Also: partly because of the greater population density of Flemish towns, the urban militias had more opportunity to practice drilling together than did a typical feudal army, which might be made up of units that met one another only on the day of a battle—a persuasive argument for a different sort of training. Moreover, soldiers fighting on their own land, and less entranced by the possibility of either personal glory or ransom, made for a scary force—even scarier when they had no expectation of a comfortable imprisonment while awaiting ransom for themselves. The Flemings had to choose between victory and death.
If it took some time for those lessons to sink in—the French were still learning them at Agincourt, more than a century later—the immediate impact wasn’t negligible. In the words of the modern historian Geoffrey W. S. Barrow, “The history of [Scotland’s] war of independence has no greater irony than the fact that the great upsurge of proletarian nationalism in Flanders . . . did more to make Scotland an English province than any other single event.” The massacre at Courtrai was measured in the lives of thousands of French knights, but it also cost Scotland any possibility of a French ally in their fight against Edward, since until Flanders was pacified, France would be unable to present a credible threat to England. Less than a year later, in May 1303, Edward I and Philip IV signed a mutual defense treaty.
That same month, Edward, the prince of Wales and heir to the Eng
lish throne, was betrothed to Philip’s only daughter, Isabella.
• • •
Edward I was a gifted soldier and able administrator, a loving husband and a terror to his vassals and enemies alike, handsome, athletic, and tall. The laws of heredity, however, allowed him to bestow only the last three on his son. The life of the prince who would become King Edward II was memorably disastrous. For centuries, his best-known portrayal was by Christopher Marlowe, in the posthumously produced 1593 play The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward II, King of England. For present-day readers, the most vivid depiction is probably the effeminate prince bullied by his father and cuckolded by William Wallace in the movie Braveheart. This image of Edward has been remarkably consistent for centuries; as early as 1321, an anonymous poem, entitled The Simonie, or the Evil Times of Edward II, enumerated the king’s military failures and personal scandals in 480 brutal stanzas.
The future prince of Wales was born at Caernarfon Castle on April 25, 1284, the youngest of (at least) fourteen children of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile.* Two of Edward’s three older brothers died before he was born, and the third, Alfonso, only four months after. The loss of the rest of his siblings—his sisters to marriage, or the convent—was more or less completed by the deaths of his mother, in October 1290, and his grandmother, Eleanor of Provence, in June 1291. High mortality among young children and middle-aged adults was a demographic fact of life in the Middle Ages—and in every age before the current one—and though tragic, Edward’s early losses were typical of his family, and of his time and class.
Not that Edward’s life was typical for anyone except royalty and the highest nobility. A prince lived at the top of a feudal pyramid that put remarkable financial pressure on the pyramid’s base. A complaint recorded by the Annals of Dunstable in 1294 read:
Two hundred dishes a day were not sufficient for [Edward’s] kitchen. Whatever he spent on himself or his followers he took without paying for it. His officials carried off all the victuals that came to market, even cheese and eggs . . . they seized bread from the bakers and beer from the ale-wives, or if they had none, forced them to brew and bake.
This, even though the ten-year-old prince’s expenses drew some £3,795 annually from the royal household accounts, which is worth somewhere more than £2 million today (by another method of calculation, which measures it against the average wage, it would be more than £35 million; that is, the prince’s household spent roughly eighteen hundred times as much as that of his typical subject).
Odd, therefore, that the most common complaints about the young prince—far more common than his profligacy—were his unkingly hobbies. Edward liked “thatching roofs, trimming hedges, plastering walls, working metal, shoeing horses, driving carts, rowing [and] swimming.” For some reason, dozens of his bemused biographers note an enthusiasm for digging ditches, an activity at which he apparently took great joy. He wrote plays; fraternized with fools, actors, and rustics; gambled; caroused; and played, evidently with both enjoyment and skill, the Celtic violin (the crwth).
But princes do what princes must, and Edward, though an unlikely soldier, accompanied his father on the brief and inconclusive invasion of Scotland and was drafted again in May 1303. In his first campaign of 1300, the king had led more than nine thousand foot soldiers and eighty-seven bannerets of cavalry, with perhaps another eight thousand armed and horsed troops. The 1303 expedition, assembled as soon as the French-brokered truce of three years before had expired, was at least twice as large, though still not enough for the intimidating victory that the English king wanted; he even sent Robert Bruce, more prisoner than lieutenant, north to raise a Scottish force in Edward’s name.
With at least five times as many soldiers as the combined forces marshaled against him, the opportunities for pitched battle were few. Instead, there was ruin. North and south of the Forth, riverbanks were dug up, dikes destroyed, orchards and croplands burned. King Edward, ever the military innovator, had ordered three bridges prefabricated and floated up the North Sea coast in order to cross the river Forth and besiege Stirling Castle from the north.
The invasion of 1303 was the fourth by Edward since the death of Alexander, and his patience—never in large supply—had entirely vanished. The king’s ruthlessness toward the Scots, which would only grow over the remaining years of his life, is usually recorded as a personal failing: a streak of cruelty verging on sadism. There’s a lot to recommend this perspective. The king delayed accepting an offered surrender from Stirling’s defenders for four full days, just so he could continue battering at the walls, and threatening the defenders with disembowelment and hanging. More famously, his rage at William Wallace barely stopped at the edge of insanity.
Wallace had scarcely been heard from militarily (though he had been active diplomatically) since Falkirk, but he was still the symbol of Scottish resistance. And Edward knew it. King Edward was unable, during the 1303 campaign, to sign even a trivial document without a reminder that Wallace still awaited capture. When offering safe conduct to Scottish nobles, he would, for example, swear that he would “watch to see how each of them conducts himself so that he can do most favour to whoever shall capture Wallace.” When Stirling fell, in July, it seemed that it would be only a matter of weeks before someone betrayed the rebel leader.
Actually, it took more than two years. After the invasion of 1303, Wallace, a spent force militarily, appeared only during minor skirmishes along the Scottish borderlands. The king, meanwhile, mended fences with his onetime adversaries, feasting some, while bribing others. No doubt it persuaded some Scottish nobility of the wisdom of betraying Wallace to Edward, but it took until the middle of August 1305 before the great symbol of Scottish resistance was captured, betrayed by a onetime follower, Sir John Menteith. Menteith is said to have blamed Wallace for the death of his brother, and—in legend at least—revealed his location to the English by turning a loaf of bread upside down in the tavern where he was taken.
After waiting more than nine years for his revenge, Edward’s haste in delivering it appears almost unseemly. Less than two weeks after the capture of the rebel leader, on August 23, Wallace stood trial at Westminster Hall in London. Admitting all of his crimes, save treason—he argued, not without some logic, that he could not have committed treason against the English king for the simple reason that he had never sworn allegiance to him—he was nonetheless convicted of it, which exposed him to the cruelest of punishments of an age that made an art of them. The first documented appearance of the so-called traitor’s death in England was its use by Henry III against a failed assassin in 1238. No doubt filial loyalty led to its adoption by Edward I, who sentenced the rebellious Welsh nobleman Dafydd ap Gruffydd to die by drawing and quartering in 1283. Tactics like the traitor’s death are used for their shock value, which means that their utility as a deterrent declines with familiarity. By 1305, only the extraordinary would capture England’s attention, and Edward’s justice was equal to the task. Wallace was dragged alive for miles through the streets of London, then half-strangled by the hangman’s noose. After, while still alive, he was castrated and disemboweled, his guts and genitalia burned. Then, and only then, was he beheaded, and his body hacked into four parts, with one quarter each sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling, and Perth. Wallace’s head was mounted on London Bridge as a warning to anyone who might be tempted to rebellion.
The king’s obsession with the capture and—there is no other word—obliteration of William Wallace seems to be more than garden-variety brutality, even in such an unimaginably bloodthirsty age. Edward had permitted Scottish nobles like Comyn to go free after defeat, and they were far guiltier of betraying a solemn oath than was Wallace, who never gave one, and went to his death saying so. Whether or not Wallace, a knight and vassal of King John Balliol, deserved the title, the king saw him as an outlaw who had somehow become a national hero. Because he was a commoner leading a national (rather than feudal)
army, Wallace was a reproach to everything that supported Edward’s own kingship. Feudal justice and the codes of chivalry allowed that opponents could be placated, once defeated. Outlaws could only be destroyed, pour encourager les autres.
The Scots took the hint. In May, the newly pacified nobles assembled a parliament at Perth, and named a ruling council, to include Robert Bruce; William Lamberton, the bishop of St. Andrews; and John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch. On the surface, Edward, who now insisted that the council ruled “the community of the land of Scotland” rather than “the community of the realm”—a bit of hairsplitting that nonetheless underlined his legal position—had won, and was prepared to be magnanimous, particularly toward the earl of Carrick and his family. Robert’s brother, Edward Bruce, received a much-coveted position in the household of the prince of Wales; another brother, Alexander—an extraordinary scholar; “no one who read arts at Cambridge before or since his time ever made such progress”—was made Dean of Glasgow.
Bruce’s actions in support of the various insurrections had been fairly covert, after all. He appears to have sabotaged the transport of some key components of the siege machines that Edward used to hammer Stirling Castle, and was more than dilatory in providing levies when demanded. On April 4, 1304, he had written to the king that he had “no success whatever in his attempts to borrow for the purpose [of procuring horses and armor].” He had been even more circumspect in his relations with Wallace. The most dramatic version of the dynamic between Wallace and Robert Bruce is one in which the former is the supremely honorable hero, whose only goal was the freedom of his nation; and Bruce little more than an opportunist, ambitious for his own family and glory. It works so well as drama because it has a lot of truth to it; Bruce made common cause with Edward I for years both before and after Wallace’s capture. But it misses the whole truth; on half a dozen occasions, Bruce was ordered to capture Wallace in Selkirk Forest, but each time, he seemed to have gotten a warning to the target in advance.
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