The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  Whatever face Bruce presented to King Edward, he kept another one turned to Scotland. A year before the capture of Wallace, on June 11, 1304, Bruce signed a secret pact with Lamberton—ostensibly innocent, actually a conspiracy against the Crown—that called for them “to resist prudently attacks by rivals . . . to provide help and succor to one another at all times and without any deceit. Neither Bruce nor Lamberton will attempt any major enterprise without consulting his colleague, and each will warn the other of any danger and try to obviate it.” Insofar as anyone can read the minds of the two conspirators, their plan seems to have been to wait for King Edward—who was, in 1305, already sixty-six years old—to die.

  What forced everyone’s hand was the position of the lord of Badenoch. The details are a little short on documentation—the primary source is the 1375 epic poem Le Brus, written by John Barbour, archdeacon of Aberdeen—but the story is that Bruce and Comyn had, in October 1305, each signed and sealed documents pledging a bargain: Whoever was to be the next king of Scotland would give up his feudal lands to the other. That is, if Comyn became king, he would grant his Badenoch estates to Bruce; if Bruce were crowned, then Comyn would receive both the earldom of Carrick and Annandale, which Bruce had inherited on the death of his father the previous year. Supposedly, in January 1306, Comyn informed the king of the existence of the letters and promised to deliver his copies, thus sentencing Bruce, then at Edward’s court in London, to death.

  The story continues: Edward announced his plans to arrest Bruce in the presence of Ralph de Monthermer, the king’s son-in-law, and one of Bruce’s supporters and friends. When Bruce received a rather poetically coded message from de Monthermer—a silver shilling with Edward’s portrait stamped on it, and a pair of spurs—he knew enough to pack up family and retainers, and head for the safer precincts of the north. En route, in one of those dramatic coincidences that are too contrived to be true but too satisfying to remain untold, Bruce and his party encountered a Scotsman riding the way they had come. Bruce’s suspicions aroused, the man was searched and found to be carrying the letter that Comyn had promised Edward.

  Whether because of the discovery of his betrayal, or some other reason, there’s no doubt that Bruce did send a message to Comyn, asking for a meeting in Dumfries, in Scotland’s southwest, on February 10. The truth is that no one knows what was said when the two left their men outside Greyfriars Church and met at the church’s altar, but the result is clear: Bruce stabbed Comyn with his dagger and left him to die; in Barbour’s version, Bruce’s follower, Roger Kirkpatrick, informed that Bruce believed he had killed Comyn, replied, “I’ll make sure” (“mak siccar”) and returned to the church to do just that.

  Barbara Tuchman, in A Distant Mirror, her chronicle of the fourteenth century, notes that the “childishness noticeable in medieval behavior, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse, may have been simply due to the fact that so large a proportion of active society was actually very young in years.” In February 1306, however, Bruce was thirty-two years old, and lacked that particular excuse. He was now a murderer, with every one of Comyn’s relatives and friends out for his blood, as well as a public traitor to the most powerful ruler in Europe. Bruce’s choice was simple: exile or rebel. He chose rebellion.

  The odds weren’t favorable. There was, however, one way to improve them. For twenty years, the Scottish Church had been the most consistent and powerful voice behind a free Scotland (and, therefore, a church free of English dominance), and it hadn’t lost faith in Bruce as its best guarantee. Bruce confessed Comyn’s murder to Andrew Wishart, bishop of Glasgow—along with Lamberton of St. Andrews, and David de Moravia, bishop of Moray, the most important prelate in Scotland—and was given absolution, not just for the murder but the sacrilege of killing him in Greyfriars Church.

  With the Church behind him, Bruce moved very fast indeed. In weeks, he gathered a force of loyal men-at-arms, and, using the element of surprise, captured the castles that dominated the western approaches to Scotland, giving himself a strategic buffer against the expected English punitive expedition. He established a route for reinforcements and supplies, both from western Scotland and Ireland.

  And he declared himself king.

  On March 23, 1306, Robert Bruce, earl of Carrick and lord of Annandale, was crowned in the Abbey of Scone in robes and vestments that had been hidden for more than a decade (though without, of course, the Stone of Destiny, still in Westminster) in a ceremony that was attended by at least five earls and four bishops, including Wishart, who performed the coronation. Tradition called for the crown to be placed on the new king’s head by the earl of Fife, who was a ward of the English king and, as cousin to the murdered John Comyn, hostile to Bruce. His sister, however, was another matter. Undeterred by her brother’s status as a de facto hostage, Isabel of Fife, countess of Buchan, raced to Scone, arriving two days after the coronation, and, in a repeat ceremony, placed the crown on Robert’s head.

  • • •

  Robert Bruce’s betrayal might have been easier for King Edward to bear had relations with his son and heir been congenial. In fact, the king of England was as much at war with his own household as with the Scottish rebels, to the point that on June 14, 1305, the prince of Wales was banished from court. The proximate cause seems to be a dispute between young Edward and one of his father’s favorites, Walter Langton, bishop of Coventry, over poaching on the bishop’s lands. Since a punishment like banishment was grossly disproportionate for such a peccadillo, the true reason must have been something else. The something else was almost certainly a courtier named Piers Gaveston.

  Gaveston was, at the time of Edward’s banishment, a twenty-one-year-old nobleman, born in the part of Gascony that was still a fief of the king of England; his father, Arnaud de Gaveston, was an old companion of Edward I, who appointed Piers a squire of the royal household, and, in 1298, one of the pueri in custodia: official companions of Edward Caernarfon.

  One chronicler, in the 1320s, wrote that when “the king’s son saw [Gaveston] he fell so much in love that he entered upon an enduring compact with him, and chose and determined to knit an indissoluble bond of affection with him, before all other mortals.” The Vita Edwardi Secundi, an anonymous history written around 1326, took a more classical tone: “Jonathan cherished David, Achilles loved Patroclus. But we do not read they were immoderate. Our King, however, was incapable of moderate favour, and on account of Piers was said to forget himself, and so Piers was accounted a sorcerer.” Thomas Burton, the Cistercian leader of the Abbey of Meaux, describes Edward as “too much given to sodomy.”* Robert de Reading, a monk of Westminster and author of the Flores Historianum, a well-regarded chronicle of the day, wrote that the king was “overcome with his own wickedness and desire for sinful, forbidden sex.”

  Even if no one can know the complete truth about what went on in the prince’s bedchamber, it was absolutely clear that their contemporaries thought that Edward and Gaveston were lovers, and, for the king, that was enough.

  King Edward’s distaste for even the possibility of homosexuality was, perversely enough, evidence of what had been until then a widespread and not especially notorious practice. Through the thirteenth century, ceremonies that can only be called homosexual marriages—so-called spiritual brotherhoods that were sanctified by priests, using the same prayers as “traditional” marriages, including the joining of right hands at the altar, followed by the ceremonial kiss—were being performed in churches throughout the Mediterranean. Alcuin, the most famous of the scholars at the court of Charlemagne, wrote a letter to a bishop that reads

  I think of your love and friendship with such sweet memories, reverend bishop, that I long for that lovely time when I may be able to clutch the neck of your sweetness with the fingers of my desires. Alas, if only it were granted to me, as it was to Habakkuk, to be transported to you, how would I sink into your embraces.

  During the fourt
eenth century, however, what had been tolerated, though not universally applauded, became criminal. A year after young Edward’s banishment, in 1306, the Byzantine emperor decreed that sex between men would henceforth be a prohibited activity in the same category as incest and sorcery. The same month that the king of England banished his son, a new pope, Clement V, had been selected, and he made his first order of business the promotion of the royal wedding of Edward and Isabella, even going so far as to request that a proxy marriage between the two be held at his own coronation in November. Hardly anything could make the price of Edward’s rumored affections for Gaveston more obvious, and Edward I determined to counteract them by separation. It can’t have helped much that one of the prince’s regular requests, during the months estranged from his father, was that Gaveston be allowed to join him.

  It’s too much to say that by spring of 1306 all was forgiven. However, the urgency of the situation in Scotland trumped King Edward’s worries about his son’s supposed degeneracy, and he once again prepared to teach his northern vassals a lesson. He was clever enough to realize that his English subjects might be wearying of invading Scotland every year or two, and he set out to promote the latest revival of this particular long-running drama as a crusade, comparable to the struggle to liberate Jerusalem from the infidels. On May 22, in a lavish and public ceremony, the king knighted his son and several dozen other young noblemen, and granted the prince of Wales the duchy of Aquitaine as his personal fief. In front of three hundred knights gathered at Westminster Hall, King Edward publicly swore vengeance for the murder of John Comyn; Edward the prince vowed never to sleep two nights in the same bed until he reached Scotland, and almost immediately headed north. The positioning of the prince of Wales as a newborn Sir Lancelot—a cynical, but understandable, bit of political theater produced by his father—was successful enough that Barbour himself, writing his poem about Robert Bruce more than sixty years later, described young Edward in 1306 as “the strongest man of any that you could find in any country.”

  Strong, possibly. Ruthless, certainly. The 1306 campaign was the cruelest yet; the king sent his son north, accompanied by Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke (and the murdered John Comyn’s brother-in-law) leading a force of three thousand cavalry. They were directed by the king to be as calculatedly brutal as possible—to, in the parlance of the time, “raise the dragon banner”: to fight without quarter. The prince took his charge seriously. He “would spare neither sex nor age. Wherever he went, he set fire to villages and hamlets and laid them waste without mercy.” It was too much even for the king, who rebuked his son, though less for his brutality than for his choice of targets—bad strategy to make the rural poor pay “the penalty for their betters, as the rich had taken to flight.” Not for the first time, war was brought to the borderlands of England and Scotland.

  • • •

  History’s true losers aren’t vanquished adversaries, but victims: In fourteenth-century Europe, and especially in the wars between Scotland and England, those who paid the harshest price for both victory and defeat, in times of dearth and even in the soon-to-disappear times of plenty, were the villagers.

  Versions of villages date from the Bronze Age, and Iron Age Europe started using some sort of cultivation plan around 600 BCE that was different from simple slash-and-burn agriculture. Slave-manned villas—whence the name—appeared in Roman-occupied Gaul during the first century BCE, and peasant-run plantations, with freemen cultivating their own plots, were a fixture throughout the later Roman empire as legionaries were pensioned off to farms from Spain to the Balkans. But the first multigenerational agricultural enterprises that resemble what we think of as the classic medieval village—an enduring nucleus of dwellings surrounded by cultivated land—didn’t make an appearance until the tenth century.

  Medieval British villages were therefore widespread long before Duke William defeated King Harold at Hastings; the 1086 Domesday Book named more than thirteen thousand of them, most with fewer than four hundred acres under cultivation. After a few centuries of consistently mild weather, a typical open-field village might cover more than a thousand acres, its barns and sheds concentrated in the center. In northern Europe, unlike the Mediterranean, where topography caused most villages to be built around hilltop castles, the church or manor occupied by the landlord was usually centrally located as well. Pastures, meadows, orchards, and plowed fields surrounded the nucleus. The demesne—the land whose produce was exclusively for the use of the lord—would usually take up a hundred acres or so; the remainder of the land was farmed by free tenants, villeins, and serfs, or given over to pasture and meadow. Almost every village was built near a stream or river partly for irrigation, mostly for the power to operate at least one mill for grinding flour, possibly another for fulling—that is, cleaning and matting wool fibers to strengthen them; “felt” shares an etymological root—probably a church, certainly a well or two. A decent-sized village might have three or four mills, plus a forge and bakery (each one owned by the lord, and leased to the miller, the smith, and the baker), but four out of ten villages were home to fewer than four hundred people, and only one in ten had more than six hundred.

  Even so, some 80 percent of Edward’s subjects—whether they accepted the name, or, as in Scotland, didn’t—lived in such villages. Their housing was as basic as possible: long halls, perhaps forty feet by fourteen, timber-frame, covered with branches smeared with clay in the construction technique known as “wattle-and-daub.” A croft in the back might be home to a small kitchen garden. People lived at one end, animals at the other. Village houses were rebuilt constantly as roads were constructed, rivers changed course, and men with weapons marched by. Some rural villages were relatively prosperous, some impoverished. Some grew more or less of one crop or the other, while others depended—more or less—on livestock. However quaint they seem to the modern imagination, though, their most salient characteristic to medieval eyes was their vulnerability.

  Because they were almost inevitably built along roads—they had to be, in order to have any chance of getting their goods to markets, on average more than six miles away—they were just as inevitably in the path of armies marching to war. Only the largest were fortified, and even then any defenses were primarily for the barns, dairies, orchards, kitchens, and residences of the secular or ecclesiastical lord who held the manor in fief.

  In any case, fortifications were no defense against the unremitting harshness of agrarian life. The rural population of Europe, even during the gentle years of the thirteenth century, was always only one bad harvest away from starvation. The system on which the entire structure depended was fragile beyond belief: a single bridge destroyed by floods might starve a country for months; an iced-in harbor could halve the calories available to an entire region.

  And even when things were good, they were bad. Farming is a hard life. Skeletons exhumed from rural medieval graves reveal that their onetime owners were almost universally afflicted with severe osteoarthritis, bone deformation, and the brittle, ivory-like degeneration known as eburnation. Harvesting using an eighteen-inch sickle (the scythe wasn’t widely used in Europe until the sixteenth century) is a repetitive movement, and forced farmers to spend dawn to dusk bent at the waist. A threshing flail weighs more than twenty pounds, and must be brought down on harvested grain twelve times a minute, for hours at a time. The total caloric expenditure was comparable to what one might find in someone training for the Olympic Games. Not, however, the input: except when times were flush, hunger and malnutrition were endemic. In most villages, the value of each additional pair of hands for sowing and harvesting was uneasily balanced by the cost of every additional mouth.

  For some villagers, one answer to the difficulties of rural life was to leave it—for the market towns and cities, and, for some, as volunteers to serve in the king’s wars. Not many, though; a feudal levy that demanded even ten thousand foot soldiers would offer employment to fewer than on
e man from each village. For most of the rural population, the only response was stoic endurance, when, as was the case in the 1306 invasion, those levies were commanded to destroy the crops, houses, and barns that must have seemed identical to the ones in which they were born.

  • • •

  During 1306, the villagers on the Scottish borderlands witnessed one indecisive skirmish after another. Bruce won no victories—in fact was ambushed and defeated, more than once—and was on the run from the English when his wife, Elizabeth Bruce; the king’s sister, Mary; and Isabel, countess of Buchan were captured. When King Edward had ordered no quarter for rebels, he had also declared that the wives of his enemies were likewise outlaws, which made them subject to rape or murder without consequence. Neither Isabel nor Mary Bruce were raped, but their punishment was nonetheless barbaric: wooden cells—cages, really—were built and attached to the walls of Berwick and Roxburgh castles, where each one was imprisoned. They would spend the next four years as a public warning to other rebels. Only Elizabeth Bruce escaped such a sentence, and only because she remained the daughter of the loyal earl of Ulster. Even so, she would be kept under house arrest for the next eight years.

  At that, the women were gently treated compared to the captured men. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, were executed. Simon Fraser, a knight who had fought with Wallace and Moray before joining Bruce, was given the traitor’s death of drawing, hanging, quartering, and beheading. So were Bruce’s companion Christopher Seton and two of Bruce’s brothers: Neil, and Alexander, the scholarly dean of Glasgow. John of Strathbogie, the earl of Atholl was captured and hanged in London, his body burned and head displayed on a spike on London Bridge. He was the first earl to be executed in England in more than two centuries.