The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  The nobility of England weren’t quite mollified yet. In 1310, they presented another Bill of Articles to Edward that sounded a new and more belligerent tone: “So poor are you and so devoid of all manner of treasure that you have nothing wherewith either to defend your land or keep up your household, except by extortions.” Faced with the implicit threat of deposition, the king agreed to the appointment of twenty-one so-called ordainers—a group of the realm’s highest nobles and bishops, most hostile to the crown’s prerogatives. Only Gaveston himself, and Walter Reynolds, the new bishop of Winchester, could be said to be supporters of the king.

  Given how heavily the dice were loaded, it wasn’t much of a surprise when, on August 2, 1311, the Lords Ordainer produced a list of forty-one ordinances, including restrictions on the king’s ability to go to war, to tax, or to borrow—his Italian banker, Amerigo dei Frescobaldi, to whom he owed some £22,000, was banished—or even to leave England without the approval of the ordainers. Even less surprising was Ordinance number 20: Gaveston, who, in an earlier version of the Ordinances, had been described as a “traitor” and “an open enemy of the king” was to be exiled “for all time and without hope of return.”

  Edward complied—at first. He exiled his favorite yet again, in November 1311, but Gaveston’s return by Christmas destroyed the fragile peace between the king and his vassals. Edward then repudiated the Ordinances, claiming that he had agreed to them under duress, restored Gaveston’s titles and lands, proclaimed the once-and-future earl of Cornwall’s reinstatement at the Guildhall, and sent him to Scarborough Castle, under orders to surrender it to no one except the king himself.

  Had the events of the spring of 1312 not hurtled to such a tragic and bloody conclusion, they would resemble an absurdist farce. In March, the archbishop of Canterbury summoned the earls of Lancaster, Pembroke, Hereford, Arundel, and Warwick to witness the long-delayed excommunication of Gaveston, after which they agreed to join together to capture him. The earls and their knights galloped off to Scarborough, only to discover that the king and Gaveston had met and escaped to Newcastle together, and that they had missed them both. Lancaster followed; the fugitives slipped away, to Tynemouth Priory. Lancaster appeared again, but Edward had already gone on to York, Gaveston back to Scarborough in an apparent attempt to throw off pursuit.

  He failed. On May 19, Gaveston was cornered at Scarborough, and surrendered to the earls of Pembroke and Surrey under very generous terms: Parliament would try him, and the two earls would guarantee his personal safety. Pembroke and Gaveston traveled south to York, the earl planning to take Gaveston to his own castle at Wallingford, where he had agreed to stay until Parliament decided his fate. On June 9, however, probably more out of carelessness than betrayal, Pembroke left his prisoner unguarded in Deddington, near Oxfordshire. The following day, Gaveston’s words came back to haunt him: the earl of Warwick captured him, crying, “I think you know me; I am the Black Dog of Arden. Get up traitor!”

  At Warwick Castle, the onetime earl of Cornwall was tried and sentenced by the earls of Warwick, Lancaster, Hereford, and Arundel to be beheaded; and on June 19, Gaveston was taken to Blacklow Hill, on an estate of Lancaster, and executed by two Welsh soldiers. According to one legend, the body lay there until found by four shoemakers. A friar, unable to bury the body, since its owner had died while under sentence of excommunication, “carried away Gaveston’s head in his hood and brought it to the king.”

  • • •

  The Simonie, the 1321 poetic screed on “the evil times” of King Edward II, indicts the king’s reign on three counts: The first was Edward’s scandalous relationship with Gaveston; the second, his failure to preserve his father’s victories in Scotland. But the real attack on Edward in The Simonie is something different. The poem’s very first lines read:

  Whii werre and wrake in londe and manslauht is i-come,

  Whii hungger and derthe on eorthe the pore hath undernome,

  Whii bestes ben thus storve, whii corn hath ben so dere . . .

  Why war, vengeance, and murder has come to the land;

  Why the poor carry the weight of hunger and famine;

  Why the beasts in the field starve, and grain is so meager . . .

  Edward had the extraordinary bad luck to rule England at the moment when an expanding population arrived at the limits set by the land’s productivity. A king’s reputation can survive a deficiency in military capability or moral stature, but not a lack of bread.

  The reason grain was “so meager” took a long time to emerge. More than six centuries after Edward’s reign, in 1966, Cambridge University Press published the first volume of its revised Cambridge Economic History of Europe, entitled The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages. The volume’s article on England was authored by an émigré economic historian named Michael Moissey Postan, who had left tsarist Russia at the time of the October Revolution, and settled in England. It was the first appearance of what came to be known as the “Postan Thesis”—a destructive combination of climate, chemistry, and colonization.

  Postan recognized that fourteenth-century Europe was the result of a centuries-long process that he termed “internal colonization”: the destruction of the great European forests, reclamation of coastal acreage by the construction of dikes and embankments, and the drainage of marshes. During the same climatic era as this “internal colonization,” Europe pushed back against its external frontiers: not merely geographic frontiers, but religious. The knightly orders of Calatrava, Alcántara, and Santiago began the long process of driving Islam out of the Iberian Peninsula, where it had been established since the eighth century; later, the Crusader order known as the Germans of the House of St. Mary in Jerusalem—that is, the Teutonic Knights—conquered pagan Prussia. The two processes worked in parallel: in the words of the modern historian Archibald Lewis, “Behind the moving frontiers of the Reconquista [were the] peasantry who settled much of the newly conquered land in Aragon, Castile, and Portugal . . . east of the Elbe, the lands [the Germans] seized were frequently settled by German peasants from the west.”

  The period of the Medieval Warm, in fact, is almost perfectly matched to the era of frontier expansion, with all its consequences: increasing trade and the exploitation of such newly found natural resources as Scandinavian timber; the Baltic fisheries; and mines of salt, silver, lead, zinc, and copper. Europe’s frontiers pushed east across the Elbe, south across Iberia (as well as the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and, via the Normans, both the island of Sicily and the southernmost part of the Italian peninsula) and, of course, north into England, Wales, and Scotland. The internal frontiers—the forests, marshes, and swamps—were even more significant. The primeval forests were “hacked down and divided into assarts. Polders rescued maritime Flanders, Holland, and much of Northern Germany and Eastern England from the sea.”

  The defining characteristic of frontiers, however, is that they come to an end. As the thirteenth century turned into the fourteenth, Europe’s internal frontiers had reached their limits. Population growth exceeded the supply of land. Wages decreased, and rents increased, substantially. Overall productivity stagnated, while population continued to grow.

  The result, according to Postan, wasn’t simply the already well-documented fact that medieval agricultural yields declined. His thesis was that the decline was a direct result of the farming techniques that were forced upon the rural peasantry by an ever-increasing number of mouths to feed. The pressure to produce ever more food discouraged fallowing—allowing a portion of every farm to go unplowed, unsown, and unharvested. It encouraged the production of cereals at the expense of everything else. And it demanded the conversion of pasture to farmland, which both reduced the supply of manure and moved it farther and farther away from the crops that needed it. The problem wasn’t merely that they weren’t producing enough food for today, but that, every year, they compromised their ability to do so for tomorrow.

&nb
sp; Though they didn’t know it, they had a nitrogen problem.

  Nitrogen is, by far, the most common component of the Earth’s atmosphere, comprising more than 70 percent of its volume. It would not, therefore, seem to be the sort of thing that is ever in short supply, which is a good thing, since the element is essential for just about every organic process, including the creation of amino acids and proteins. However, atmospheric nitrogen isn’t actually very useful at any stage of either plant or animal metabolism. What plants need are actually nitrates—one molecule of nitrogen, combined with three of oxygen, or NO3—in order to produce the photosensitive molecule known as chlorophyll, every version of which has four nitrogen atoms. Plants get all the NO3 they need from the soil, where bacteria and fungi have produced it, in a series of steps, from the ammonium and ammonia that comes from decomposed plant matter.

  There are a number of ways to disrupt this elegant self-sustaining sequence, and the most significant is agriculture itself: harvesting plants, rather than letting them decompose and return the nitrogen to the soil in the form of fertilizer.

  Nitrogen is the first essential element to be used up, which means that the most destructive thing humans can do to soil is not burning the trees and plants that live in it, or building houses and barns over it, or even exterminating the animals that depend on it, but cultivating it with food crops. However, even with intensively cultivated land, there are many ways to replace the nitrogen removed when crops are harvested—a good thing, since the addition of nitrogen to soil generates huge increases in productivity: twenty bushels of wheat for every “nitrified” acre, as opposed to six without.

  It’s not that medieval farmers weren’t aware that soils could be depleted. They even knew some of the solutions. The most obvious was fertilizing cropland with nitrogen-rich manure. Slightly less obvious: replacing the sort of crops that use up nitrogen with those whose roots serve as homes to bacteria that are able to “fix” it in the soil. As early as the first century BCE, Roman farmers knew that turning a wheat field into a pasture nitrifies the soil because clovers are natural nitrogen fixers; planting peas and legumes does the same thing.

  Fourteen centuries later, though, European farmers weren’t planting nitrogen fixers. Or, more accurately, they weren’t planting enough. The reasons are controversial but are almost certainly a consequence of the same mild-weather-enabled population explosion that led to manorialism itself. As more and more pasture and woodland was converted to farmland, the “production” of manure was reduced at the same time that the acreage needing fertilization increased.* Even though fallowing (or planting peas) could increase the long-term productivity of an acre of cropland, medieval farmers—both landlords and tenants—were virtually incapable of anything but short-term thinking. The economic historian Gregory Clark makes the point that the defining characteristic of feudal manorialism was the price its participants put on the future. The temperament that led to wars over personal slights (or even murderous rages) is the same as the one that encouraged the unsustainable use of arable land. It was a culture constitutionally inclined to sacrifice the future in order to satisfy the present.

  Tenant farmers, by definition, have what’s known in economic jargon as a high rate-of-time discount: they don’t care about benefits that are earned after the end of their tenancy (especially since improved yields were subject to increased rents). And the landholding barons, earls, and monarchs who should have put a high value on the future—that is, should have had a low rate-of-time discount—didn’t have any more interest in deferring gratification than the poorest villein farmer. Despite their obsessive interest in adding to their ancestral lands by marriage or conquest, they did remarkably little to improve them—to increase their agricultural productivity. With no more forests to cut down, or land to reclaim, the only way to preserve the system for another generation of lordlings was by taking land from someone else.

  Even if the land was as poor as the lowlands of Scotland.

  • • •

  In 1909, the English journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Angell wrote a pamphlet, later republished as a book entitled The Great Illusion. In it, he argued that war between modern European countries was inherently futile, since each nation’s wealth—a function of what he called “credit and contract”—could not be expropriated by a conqueror without destroying it entirely: either the assets of a conquered territory stayed in the hands of its existing population, or it vanished. Thus “conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by x, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by x.”

  Angell was on to something; the conquest of medieval Scotland was, by any rational economic calculus, a poor bargain for both of England’s King Edwards, who together spent more than the entire value of the country in one failed expedition after another.

  That particular bit of logic works both ways. Robert Bruce and his followers didn’t calculate the monetary costs of resistance any more than England measured the benefits of conquest. Far stronger passions than economic ones were needed, and no one exhibited them more powerfully, or more durably, than the man who would play Little John to Robert Bruce’s Robin Hood: Sir James Douglas.

  Douglas’s father, Sir William, had been the commander of Berwick Castle during the 1296 English invasion, and had joined Wallace (and Bruce) the following year, before surrendering to Edward Longshanks and being imprisoned in the Tower of London, while James, then twelve, was sent to France for his own safety. When Sir William died in 1298, the newly made bishop of St. Andrews, William Lamberton, who was then in Paris negotiating with the French, took the young Douglas into his own household.

  There he remained until Bruce’s decision to strike for the throne. When Comyn was murdered, Lamberton was at Berwick, apparently working diligently on behalf of the provincial government authorized by King Edward. Once he heard about the events at Greyfriars, he made plans to leave Berwick secretly and headed to Scone for the coronation. At the same time, James, now twenty, either stole, or was “allowed” to steal, one of Lamberton’s horses—the chroniclers loved the story so much that they even recorded the horse’s name: Ferrand—and rode from Berwick to join Bruce on the road to his coronation. As Barbour told it in his romantic poem, James met Bruce’s party on their way to Scone, and immediately fell to his knee, giving Bruce his homage as Scotland’s rightful king. “Thus they made their acquaintance that never afterwards by any chance of any kind was broken while they lived. Their friendship increased ever more and more for Douglas served always loyally, and Bruce . . . gladly and well rewarded his service.”

  For once, Barbour was probably understating the case. Bruce may have earned a reputation for living off the land after his 1306 defeat, but that he lived at all was because of Douglas. While Scotland’s “army” (probably fewer than two hundred men) headed west, with Aymer de Valence in hot pursuit, they were trapped on the shores of Loch Lomond, with no way across. And there they would have been captured had Douglas not found a propitiously hidden boat sunk among the reeds that could carry three men at a time across the loch. This became one of the themes of the 1307 refugee campaign: Douglas rising in prominence, tellingly, not as a fighter (yet) but as a forager—or, more precisely, a poacher: for finding venison, pike, and salmons, “there was not one among them there . . . more than James Douglas.”

  An insurgency must feed itself to survive against an occupying army; to defeat one, however, it must destroy the occupier’s morale, and Douglas was born for the job. His own estate had been forfeit when his father was captured in 1298, and he had joined with Bruce at least in part to restore his own fortunes. In March 1307, just after the king and his men had returned to Scotland, he gave Douglas leave to take his barony back, and James left immediately for Douglasdale, in the southwest of Scotland, accompanied by only two companions. In the oft-told, too-good-to-be-true story, upon his arrival, he recruited a band of loyal locals, waited until the Englis
h garrison headed to the parish church to celebrate Palm Sunday, and then fell on them with his two soldiers and a few dozen of his father’s former vassals. He then proceeded to his “own” castle, where his cook prepared the feast that had been planned for the English garrison. And then, in the legend that became known as “Douglas’s larder,” the Scots ate the feast prepared, burned the remainder, ransacked the castle’s stores, salted the well, and beheaded every one of the English prisoners before leaving, bringing the men of Douglasdale to augment the king’s not-quite-army.

  That army’s prospects had, at just that moment, started to brighten. After Longshanks’s death, and Edward II’s brief march through Scotland, Bruce finally had the opportunity to establish his authority as king, and the campaigns of 1307–08 really mark the turning point of Bruce’s fortunes. After defeating Aymer de Valence at Loudon Hill in May 1307, he returned to Carrick, of which he was still nominally the earl, recaptured the castle, and defeated the garrison. He sent Douglas to establish control of Ettrick Forest, as a base for raids on English strongholds, and took Inverness Castle in a surprise attack, killing the garrison and razing the castle to the ground. In December, he agreed to a truce with the earl of Buchan—the “other” John Comyn, cousin to Bruce’s victim at Greyfriars—and then spent the spring undermining him: Instead of attacking Comyn directly, he raided the rural peasants who supplied the Comyns with food and rents, offering them the choice of being burned out or shifting their tribute to Bruce. He offered temporary truces to enemies like the earl of Ross and John of Lorne. And, in May 1308, he defeated Comyn himself at Inverurie despite being so sick that he couldn’t sit upright on a horse without two men holding him up.