After Inverurie, with the earl of Buchan in full flight, Bruce proved that he was just as brutally effective against his Scottish enemies as against the English. The “harrying of Buchan”—sometimes called the rape of Buchan, which included summary executions of every Comyn supporter, the burning of every Comyn manor, and the destruction of every Comyn farm—was so complete that it would be nearly a century before the lands would even be claimed as a fief, and never again by a Comyn.
Even outside of Buchan, the Comyn cause was shattered; the earl of Buchan was nothing like the soldier that his cousin of Badenoch had been, and was unable to meet Bruce on anything like successful terms. Neither were his allies immune: Bruce defeated the Macdowalls of Galloway and the Macdougalls of Lorne before any English support could return in force, which brought Buchan, Ross, Argyll, and Galloway, the four areas most loyal to Comyn—and, through him, to John Balliol—under his control.
By March 1309, Bruce had consolidated his authority throughout Scotland, persuading the Scottish clergy—including Lamberton, the bishop of St. Andrews, who had just been paroled by Edward II and sent north as a peace offering, though not Bishop Wishart of Glasgow, who was in the custody of the pope—and earls to declare that the original coronation of John Balliol had been wrongly decided, and that Robert Bruce the Competitor (the current king’s grandfather) should have been king after all. Balliol was an illegitimate ruler, entirely the creation of the English; and that Robert Bruce was the true and nearest heir to Alexander III. However satisfying this may have been to Bruce and his supporters, it made Edward II’s attempts at conciliation moot. He wasn’t about to accept an independent Scottish king, and Bruce wasn’t about to accept anything else.
More consequentially, Bruce had entered into correspondence with his nation’s favorite fair-weather friend, Philip IV of France, who proposed a truce between Scotland and England, which meant recognizing Bruce’s claim as Scotland’s king. Literally: the documents Philip sent to Edward referred to Robert Bruce only as the earl of Carrick, while those he sent to Bruce addressed him as King of Scots.
When the letters came to light, their implicit message did not, needless to say, sit especially well with Edward II, who rebuked his father-in-law about his acceptance of Bruce’s kingship. Philip, instead of apologizing, demanded that Edward do fealty to him in Paris for his French holdings, but Edward, fearful for Gaveston’s safety—correctly, as events proved—refused. Instead, he assembled yet another invading force for Scotland, and, on September 8, 1310, advanced to Biggar in southern Scotland. Bruce, by now an old hand at this, refused battle and retreated north of the Firth of Forth, leaving Douglas behind to harass the English. The lowland Scottish peasantry, also by now experienced, collected all their seed corn and livestock, and headed for the hills, leaving the cavalry-heavy English force with no forage for their horses, as Bruce “lurked continually in hiding [and] did them all the injury that he could.”
Edward was completely flummoxed. He stayed at Berwick until December, emerging only when Bruce let it be known he was planning an invasion—completely fictitious—of the Isle of Man, which allowed the Scots to open their eastern coastline for food and weapons. By then, a winter campaign looked so unappealing to Edward’s generals, Sir John Segrave and Sir Robert de Clifford—in the words of the Chronicle of Lanercost: “the English do not willingly enter Scotland to wage war before summer, chiefly because earlier in the year they find no food for their horses”—that they signed a series of truces with the Scots, extending to June 1310. Even had they a taste for winter campaigning, they would have had to contend with another enemy: Edward could no longer avoid the restraints of the Lords Ordainer, whose first Bill of Articles explicitly observed, “you have lost Scotland and grievously dismembered your crown in England and Ireland . . . whereas the commonalty of your realm give you the 20th penny from their goods in aid of your Scotch war . . . all levied and foolishly spent.” In July 1311, the king returned to Westminster, a month before the publication of the forty-one Ordinances that would ultimately lead to Gaveston’s death.
Edward’s departure left Bruce free to attack the garrisoned forts that were the basis of England’s military power in Scotland. Though he lacked the siege engines needed to take the larger castles, nothing stopped him from nibbling at the smaller ones. James Douglas, in particular, proved adept at luring garrisons out from behind their walls by teasing them with cattle herds; when the English came out to seize them, he ambushed them. He worked the same magic at his ancestral castle of Douglasdale three times before he finally razed the castle to the ground. Bruce himself had taken half a dozen castles, most significantly the fortress and port of Aberdeen, which permitted the reestablishment of a trading entrepot with the Continent, particularly Flanders and the Hanseatic cities of the Baltic. In a little more than two years, Bruce was transformed from a hunted fugitive, never leading more than fifty supporters (and just as frequently only two or three) to the ruler of two-thirds of Scotland.
By trial and error, King Robert was perfecting his strategy of avoiding Edward’s armies while destroying their supplies. The next step was forcing the English to finance their own defeat. After continuous raids through the fall of 1311, in February 1312, Bruce burned the village of Corbridge, but instead of continuing to ravage the rest of Northumbria, this time he reminded the rest of the county that, instead of paying their share—a bit more than £916—of what amounted to a national English property tax, they could pay him instead: with a modest enough increase, to £2,000.
Extortion was lucrative: at least £20,000 overall, from the bishopric of Durham, from Hexham, Cumberland, Coupland, and Westmorland. The “leading men” of Dunbar offered a payment of £2,000 for ten months’ truce, to run until midsummer of 1313; Northumbria made an identical offer, £2,000 having become the going rate, with hostages taken as security for the “loan.” By 1313, the whole enterprise was running like a real business, with careful record-keeping and even negotiated extensions; when Cumberland fell behind in payments, Bruce burned “many towns and two churches, taking men and women prisoners, and collect[ing] a great number of cattle” as a penalty. The total, according the Chronicle of Walter Guisborough, amounted to some £40,000 (more than £13 million today). Not only was Bruce raising the money he needed to purchase armor and weapons from Flanders and the Hanse, he was denying a similar amount to Edward.
This was not a trend that could continue indefinitely, though less for reasons of economic advantage than national pride. Whether Edward recognized Robert Bruce as a rebel or as a king was immaterial. In the first case, the north of England was the victim of a criminal insurrection; in the second, a foreign invasion. And a king who could not protect his northern border from either was no king at all.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Scots, Wha Hae”
1313–1315
The circumstances that led two kings into a decisive collision on the banks of a tiny stream in central Scotland seem, in retrospect, inevitable. To the participants, they were anything but. Though Edward’s northernmost vassals were being bled dry by Bruce’s “taxes,” the far more populous and wealthy south of England was barely affected, which offered a good deal of insulation from Bruce’s provocations. The English king, meanwhile, had plenty with which to occupy himself without venturing northward, since, after Gaveston’s judicial murder, Edward had sworn vengeance on the earls he held responsible: Lancaster, Warwick, and Hereford (the earls of Pembroke and Surrey aligned with the king). King Robert, on the other hand, was making a very profitable art out of avoiding direct battle with Edward’s armies. Neither had any strategic reason to pursue a winner-take-all battle with the other.
As a result, the path that brought them to the same battlefield, on the same day, meanders quite a bit. A good place for it to begin is September 1312, three months after the death of Gaveston, when Lancaster, Warwick, and Hereford marched on Edward, headquartered in London. The earls were forbi
dden entry to the city proper by a combination of loyalist troops and the city’s militia, while the king sent envoys across the Channel—to Pope Clement, and to King Philip of France—hoping to achieve victory over his hostile nobles (and the end of the Ordinances) by diplomacy.
The pressure seems to have worked. In December, the king and his peers negotiated a treaty—carefully, and indecisively. Neither king nor earls appeared at the negotiations out of fear of treachery, and the document that emerged didn’t resolve anything at all. The king still maintained, to anyone who would listen, that the Ordinances were null and void, contravening the Magna Carta, the Charter of the Forest, the king’s own coronation oath, canon law, and the unified system of precedents and case law inaugurated in the reign of Henry II that had come to be known as the “common law.” The magnates, on the other hand, continued to insist on confirmation of the Ordinances and pardons for the death of Gaveston. Given that sort of standoff, the final agreement was little more than a face-saving compromise: Edward was permitted to carve out some of the Ordinances with which he disagreed most vehemently (mostly on finance) while pardoning Gaveston’s murderers, all the while proclaiming that Gaveston had not been a traitor. Of far more relevance to most of Edward’s subjects was the matter of taxes. Unable to persuade Parliament to grant him a new set of tax revenues, the agreement freed Edward to impose his own, amounting to one part in ten of all revenues—essentially a national sales tax—and one part in fifteen of the value of all moveable goods, which, since it exempted the value of land, lay rather more heavily on England’s peasantry than its aristocracy. Edward did not limit himself to simple taxes on sales and movables. With his credit restored, he was able to borrow again, nearly £100,000 from a variety of sources, each loan brokered by the Genoese banker Antonio Pessagno, who had taken over for Frescobaldi.*
It was enough to pay for Isabella and Edward to travel to France, in May 1313, hoping to settle a decent peace with Philip IV over the still-disputed territories of Gascony and Aquitaine; and not at all incidentally, to guarantee Philip’s support of Edward in his conflicts with the earl of Lancaster and his supporters. It’s not known whether the subject of Scotland was raised, though it seems likely. Certainly the latest in a long line of increasingly fragile peace treaties between France and England was an occasion for celebration. Amid great pageantry in Paris, Isabella’s three brothers were each knighted, and the two kings, Edward and Philip, made vows to join each other on crusade.
While Edward was replenishing his treasury, King Robert was consolidating his sovereignty. The campaigns of the previous four years had given him control over almost all of Britain north of the Firth of Forth (as well as a fair bit of northern England) but the English still maintained garrisons in the most formidable castles in Scotland. As long as they remained in the hands of an occupying army, their recapture was King Robert’s highest priority.
Without artillery to throw boulders at castle walls—fourteenth-century trebuchets used a counterweighted arm to sling projectiles weighing two hundred pounds nearly a quarter-mile—he was unable to batter his way to victory in the manner of Edward I at Stirling in 1303. Instead, he made a virtue of his relative military poverty, and developed tactics that typically involved surprise attacks on castle walls with nothing more than light scaling ladders. As related in the Chronicle of Lanercost:
Now these ladders, which they placed against the walls, were of a wonderful construction . . . the Scots had made two strong ropes as long as the height of the wall, making a knot at the end of each cord. They had made a wooden board, also, about two feet and a half broad, strong enough to carry a man and in the two extremities of the board they had made two holes through which the two ropes could be passed.
With iron hooks intended as grapnels, and fenders to hold the ladder away from the wall, Bruce’s soldiers used very long spears to hoist the hooks over the walls—rarely more than eighteen feet high—and then climbed up and over. This is precisely what they did at Perth on January 7, 1313, with Bruce himself swimming the moat at night and putting the first ladder on the wall. Not to be outdone, on the night of February 19, 1314, Scots under James Douglas captured Roxburgh Castle in an even more audacious attack: wearing black cloaks over their armor, his troops crawled to the base of the castle’s walls on a moonless night, hoisted their rope ladders over the battlements, and surprised the garrison in the middle of its Shrove Tuesday celebrations.
The élan of Bruce’s lieutenants was contagious. Thomas Randolph, who had been captured by Douglas in 1308—he had changed sides, briefly, two years before—had been welcomed back by King Robert, who made him the new earl of Moray in 1312. In March 1314, Randolph was sent by Bruce to capture Edinburgh Castle, which had been built on a scarp too high even for scaling ladders. Randolph’s response was to recruit thirty highlanders with a talent for rock climbing, who ascended the cliff to the base of the wall, clambered over, and entered the castle to open the gates to the rest of his force.*
The 1313 attacks on English castles were so successful that by spring, fewer than six remained in English hands, two of them—Stirling Castle, which had been occupied by English troops since 1303, and Berwick, which Edward Longshanks had sacked in 1296—virtually invulnerable to any Scottish attack. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1314, Stirling was invested by Edward Bruce. When the king’s brother was unable to take the castle by surprise assault, his lack of patience with siege work in general led him to an agreement with the garrison’s commander, Sir Philip Mowbray: If, by midsummer of 1314, the castle hadn’t been relieved—actually, unless an English army got to within three leagues of the castle, about ten miles—Mowbray agreed to yield.
Though neither the king of England nor the king of Scotland had been a party to the agreement, it bound them nonetheless. When King Edward learned, on May 26, about the deal between Mowbray and Edward Bruce, he was already traveling to Berwick, the strongest castle in Scotland still held by the English. He had already embargoed the export of all foodstuffs and requisitioned a wagon train of more than a hundred each of four-horse and eight-oxen carts. With a decisiveness that would have done his father proud, he immediately ordered the mustering of his army, sending a formal writ to his vassals commanding them to appear with their levies at Berwick on June 10. The total number of men summoned added up to 21,640 infantry from England and Wales, plus 4,000 from Ireland. Lancaster, Warwick, Surrey, and Arundel—essentially the anti-Gaveston party—couldn’t completely ignore the command, but, citing the Ordinance prohibiting the king from going to war without permission, sent the bare minimum required by their feudal obligation.
They were, however, the only ones. Edward’s host, between eighteen and twenty thousand (with at least two thousand mounted knights, and three thousand Welsh archers) included the earls of Pembroke and Gloucester; John Comyn, the son of Bruce’s victim; the unforgettably named Sir Pain Tiptoft and Sir Marmaduke Tweng. Also in Edward’s army, which was large enough, according to the Vita, “to traverse all Scotland,” was Sir Giles d’Argentan, whom Barbour described as the “third best knight of his day” (the other two were the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII, and King Robert himself). The newly affluent king’s army also included a train of auxiliaries, including smiths, farriers, carpenters, and cooks (and prostitutes, of course), along with the king’s household servants, needed to set up and take down the king’s pavilions daily and set his table with both cloth and plates of gold hourly. The king had even hired a troubadour to write an ode commemorating the coming victory.
Robert prepared to meet them, though reluctantly; according to Barbour, his reaction to his brother’s bargain was, “That was unwisely done, indeed.” Summoning the commanders of secondary expeditions currently under way all over Scotland produced a total of no more than six thousand men, which the king separated into four divisions: One, the vanguard of approximately five hundred, was given to Thomas Randolph, earl of Moray; the second, of a thousand or so, was to be
commanded by Edward Bruce; another thousand men, in the third division, were nominally under the High Steward (now Walter Stewart, upon the death of James Stewart in 1309) but actually commanded by James Douglas. The fourth division, some two thousand infantry, was commanded by the king himself, with a few hundred mounted skirmishers under Sir Robert Keith, Scotland’s marischal.
The battle for which both sides prepared is a regular feature on lists of the “Great Battles of History.” It deserves its place. Bannockburn, the site of the 1314 meeting between Edward and Robert Bruce, didn’t merely mark a change in warfare itself, but revealed how deeply the conduct of war was a reflection of politics, economics, and culture.
Consider the asymmetry of the two armies. The English force’s core of armored knights were not, after all, still the dominant force on fourteenth-century battlefields because of their intrinsic superiority in the application of violence. It was the very particular environment of medieval Europe that selected for the armored knight; knights were the way an entire culture formalized both the ownership of land and the defense (and sometimes the acquisition) of it, not because they were an efficient way of doing so but precisely because they were inefficient. The more expensive it was to produce a class of militarily trained landed gentry, the easier it was for those in that class to maintain their position.
What made the medieval knight so successful was actually his confidence in his trained skill. It’s very hard, even unnatural, to make a vocation out of killing and maiming others, particularly in an era when the administration of violence was such an up-close-and-personal activity. Only a lifetime of training was likely to overcome the natural urge to avoid such violent encounters, and as long as the training was monopolized by those who could afford it, horses and armor made the mounted knights of the High Middle Ages unchallengeable.*
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